by Ray Bradbury
WELLER: Why did they rule in favor of Huston?
BRADBURY: It must be that he wielded too much power.
WELLER: Did you ever see John Huston again?
BRADBURY: I saw him at the premiere for the film at the Pantages Theater in 1956. We were cordial to each other. Enough time had gone by. After all, the film turned out okay, and they used my script. Thank God for that.
Years later, just before John died, I was at the Bistro Gardens, an open-air restaurant in Beverly Hills, having dinner there with my friend Sid Stebel, and I saw John sitting at a table with my old film agent, Ray Stark. Stark was my agent for my first meeting with Huston and he was there for my last encounter with him. Can you believe that? John had a tank of oxygen with him and a hose. I believe he had emphysema. Jack Nicholson was there at the table, too.
I went over to their table and in front of all these people—John Huston, Jack Nicholson, Ray Stark, and two others—I said to everyone, “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ray Bradbury, and I want to make a little speech here. I’ll never have another chance to make it.” I pointed to John, and I said, “This man changed my life completely and forever. Only for the good. He gave me the job of writing Moby Dick thirty years ago, and it all turned out beautifully because he read my stories and thought maybe I could do a screenplay. But I wanted to thank him tonight in front of people, and you can go tell people that Ray Bradbury spoke to you tonight and told you that he loves John Huston and thanks him forever.” So I shook John’s hand and walked away. That was it. True story.
WELLER: How did Huston respond?
BRADBURY: His jaw dropped a bit. And then he said, “Thank you.”
WELLER: Despite all the drama involved in working with him, you forgave him completely.
BRADBURY: As John said himself, we all have our foibles. If we judge our friends by their faults, we’d have no friends.
WELLER: What other film projects over the course of your career were you offered?
BRADBURY: When I returned from Ireland after writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, there were several offers, but I turned them all down. I had offers to write Good Morning, Miss Dove; Anatomy of a Murder; Les Diaboliques; Friendly Persuasion; and The Man with the Golden Arm. Those were the main ones.
I remember walking down Hollywood Boulevard a couple years later and three of the films I had turned down were playing at theaters at the same time: Good Morning, Miss Dove, Anatomy of a Murder, and The Man with the Golden Arm.
WELLER: Why did you turn those offers down?
BRADBURY: The Man with the Golden Arm, drugs. Anatomy of a Murder, rape.
WELLER: So it was the subject matter?
BRADBURY: Yeah. And I wanted to spend time with my family. I also knew that no one ever remembered screenwriters. How many can you name?
WELLER: You have a point.
BRADBURY: And I didn’t do Friendly Persuasion because they already had a screenplay, written by a Communist sympathizer—or maybe he wasn’t—Michael Wilson, and they went ahead and used his screenplay under an assumed name, and later the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. They didn’t reveal the writer’s name until many years later. Terrible, terrible period.
WELLER: Wait, they offered it to you but it had already been written?
BRADBURY: Robert Wyler, William Wyler’s brother, came to me and said, “We want to do Friendly Persuasion, and we have the rights to the book and here’s a screenplay that’s been done and we think it needs work.” Well, I read it and I said, “It doesn’t need work, shoot it.” And they said, “We can’t.” And I said “Why not?” “Because this guy’s on the list with McCarthy,” and it was after McCarthy had retired even, as I recall, and I said, “Be brave, make the film.” “Well, we can’t do that. Will you work on it?” And I said, “I can’t work on it because it’s perfect, and I’m not going to lend my name to a project like this. Change the name and shoot the film and then later you can reveal who the real author is, as long as you pay him, huh?” So they did that and they paid him.
WELLER: Let’s talk about your relationship with Rod Serling and your work for his series The Twilight Zone. Where did you first meet Serling?
BRADBURY: It was around 1958. His series started in ’59 or ’60, something like that. We were at an awards dinner together. He was a friend of the writer John Gay, and John Gay was working at Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions with me on various scripts. We worked on White Hunter, Black Heart, the John Huston book, together. During this time Rod was doing two-hour specials and he was beginning to be well known, so the night of the awards banquet at the Writers Guild, we sat with Rod and his wife and John Gay.
After dinner, Rod said he was starting a series, a fantasy series, but he didn’t really know what he was doing, he needed help. I said, “Come to the house with me right now and I’ll give you books that will help you.” I gave him copies of books by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, John Collier, and Roald Dahl. I said, “Now you’ve got a complete idea of what your show should be like. Buy some of these stories or hire these authors to work for you, because you can’t do the whole thing yourself.”
WELLER: You have been pretty vocal over the years that you felt Serling stole ideas from you. Can you explain?
BRADBURY: He was unconsciously aggressive. He plagiarized without knowing it.
WELLER: You really believe that?
BRADBURY: The first program of Twilight Zone is based on a story from The Martian Chronicles. He invited me to a screening with my friend Bill Nolan and the other boys in the gang, you know, and when we came out, we all looked at each other and said, “God, that looks a little bit like a story from The Martian Chronicles.” I didn’t say anything because I was embarrassed.
A month or so later, Rod called me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, “Tell you what?” He said, “Well, my pilot script is based partially on a story of yours from The Martian Chronicles.” He said, “I was in bed reading with my wife and Carol turned over, she was reading The Martian Chronicles, and she said, ‘Rod, read this, it’s like your pilot.’ ” And he said, “My God, I realized that inadvertently I’d stolen part of your idea.” He said, “I’ve gotta buy your story and make amends.” I said, “No, you don’t. The very fact that you called me and recognized that happened, that’s it. There are no problems.”
He called back two weeks later and said, “I can’t stand it, you know. I can’t stand it. I’ve gotta buy your story. My lawyers will call you.” He hung up and the lawyers never called. He shouldn’t have made the second call. He was off the hook. I let him off the hook. And then he called and talked about his lawyers and they never called. Well, after that, he stole from Henry Kuttner, he stole from John Collier.
WELLER: Blatantly?
BRADBURY: Well, again, no, of course not, it was all indirectly, but I got a phone call one night from Bill Nolan, I think it was, who said, “Turn on your set, Rod’s done it again.” And I turned it on and it was a variation of “Presenting Moonshine,” a John Collier story. I don’t think Serling knew what he was doing.
WELLER: Really?
BRADBURY: I’m trying to be generous. He wrote too much too soon, you see, and forgot what he was digesting.
WELLER: Yet you wrote for the program. You wrote the episode “I Sing the Body Electric” and two other scripts that went unproduced. If you felt betrayed by him after his lawyers didn’t call you, why did you write for him?
BRADBURY: Nothing much more happened like that, you see, and time went by. I ignored the fact that the lawyers didn’t call. I did “I Sing the Body Electric” for him. Then George Clayton Johnson did a story which was like “Death and the Maiden,” and Bill Nolan read it and warned him that it was a plagiarism of my story. George said it wasn’t. We warned Rod about it, that George had done this, and nothing was done. Gladys Cooper played the woman, and the male lead was played by Robert Redford. Well, it went on the air, and we all watched it, and sure enough it was a copy of “De
ath and the Maiden.” So that was an irritation.
I went to a party six months or a year after that and an editor was there from Bantam Books who edited my work when I began with them twenty years before, and he knew about some of my problems with Rod, and he said to people at the party, “Tell them your opinion of Rod Serling, tell them about your problems. We’ve heard rumors.” I said, “No, I don’t want to talk about it.” He said, “Come on, it’s not gonna hurt,” so I let him egg me on and I told them about the pilot. The next day, I got a call from Rod.
WELLER: What did he say?
BRADBURY: Someone at the party—I think my editor—called Rod and told him what went on. That I was talking. And Rod said over the phone, “I hear you’re talking behind my back.” I said, “Rod, you want me to talk to your face? Meet me this afternoon for drinks in Santa Monica and I’ll tell you my story, okay?”
So he came to the bar, and I said, “Let’s go down the line now. You called me fifteen years ago and confessed that you had inadvertently stolen my Martian Chronicles story, right?” “Right.” “Then I let you off the hook. I said, ‘No, the fact that you talked to me makes it okay.’ Then you called back some weeks later and said you couldn’t stand it, my lawyers have got to call you and buy the story, and I said, ‘Okay, have your lawyers call.’ ” And I said, “Rod, did your lawyers ever call?” He said, “Oh God! That’s terrible.” “It sure is,” I said. “You were off the hook with the first phone call. You should never have called me the second time. Then you plagiarized a story by John Collier, and you did one by Kuttner, right?”
Then I said, “When I ride with cab drivers, they think you write your program, all of it. That’s not true, is it?” He said, “No.” I said, “Other people help you?” “Right.” “But at the end of your show, before the commercial, a voice comes on and says, ‘Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, will be back in one minute.’ ” The commercial comes on before the credits. When the credits come on later you discover what you saw was not created by Rod Serling, but was written by Richard Matheson. “Oh, yeah, we’ll change that,” he said. Well, he never changed it. So, all these things accumulated. He said, “I’ll behave, I’ll change.”
WELLER: He was agreeable to everything you were saying?
BRADBURY: Yeah. I said, “Will you do me a favor? Hire Charles Beaumont to be your censor and editor, and every week when you finish a new script, give it to him and say, ‘Is this familiar? Did I inadvertently steal this from somewhere?’ And then he’ll tell you. And if you did, then you buy it from the author. And then there’s no trouble.” He said, “Oh, that’s a great idea, I’ll do that.” Well, he never did. And he never changed the order of the credits at the end of the show.
I can’t remember what caused me to write the final letter, but I wrote that it was the first letter I’d ever written to end a friendship, and that from now on he should please not contact me. “I’ve given you a lot of chances,” I wrote, “and you haven’t done it, so that’s the end.” I don’t like to talk about this, you see. It’s all very negative and it’s very sad. Because I have mixed feelings, you see I don’t like this sort of thing.
WELLER: You had another plagiarism experience with CBS. You sued the network for stealing your work in 1957. What is the story behind that lawsuit?
BRADBURY: I’d just returned from Europe, and a friend called me and said, “Watch Playhouse 90 on Sunday night, they’re stealing your Fahrenheit 451.” I said, “Come on, they’re not going to do that. That would be ridiculous.” My friend said, “Well, I watched a rehearsal at the studio the other day and by God it’s your story.” I didn’t turn it on. I was having dinner with some friends at home around nine p.m. at night. Halfway through the program, I got a phone call from Connecticut, from a stranger who had called the operator and said, “Put me through to Ray Bradbury. It’s an emergency.” The operator got me on the line and this stranger said, “Mr. Bradbury, do you have your TV set on? You’re being robbed right at this very moment on Playhouse 90.” I thanked him and hung up and turned on the set—sure enough, there’s the plagiarism.
I went to my agents the next day and told them about it. And I called CBS. I said, “I want to see the film tomorrow afternoon.” And I went with my friends Bill Nolan and others, and we saw the broadcast of Playhouse 90. After they ran the film, I went to my agents and said, “I want to sue these people.” My agents said, “Well, we won’t do it.”
WELLER: Why?
BRADBURY: Conflict of interest. They were afraid of offending CBS. So I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to sue them all on my own, and I’m going to win, and you’re not going to get anything.” So it took me three years. I wrote most of the briefs. My lawyers didn’t know what plagiarism was. It had to go all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, because I lost the first time out. It took three years, and it was not worth it. There are others I could have sued over the years, but I couldn’t take it. It takes too long and it’s too tiring.
WELLER: On a more positive note, you wrote seven episodes of the television program, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Tell me about that experience. Did you get to know Hitchcock?
BRADBURY: All the people associated with that program were wonderful. I never had any trouble writing for them. We would have lunch when I turned in my script. We’d have another lunch after they read it, and if they had any arguments, we’d argue over lunch. If I won, the script stayed the way it was; if they won, I’d make slight changes. I had a terrific relationship with the producers, Norman Lloyd and Joan Harrison. Mr. Hitchcock would come in and out from time to time. He was terrific. I interviewed him one day over lunch along with Arthur Knight, the cinema writer. It turns out that everything Hitchcock said to us, he had said in a book by François Truffaut. Hitchcock was repeating himself, so the interview was never published.
WELLER: Was there ever talk of doing a film with Hitchcock?
BRADBURY: He had a meeting with me and gave me a copy of the novella The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. I took it home and read it and met with Hitchcock the next day. I said, “Mr. Hitchcock, I’d like to do this, but you have to wait two weeks.” I told him I was already working on a script but that I’d be done in two weeks. He told me he couldn’t wait. I told him, “Mr. Hitchcock, you have to wait. I can’t work for you.” He said, “Who are you working for?” And I said, “Alfred Hitchcock. I’m working for you on your television series.” But he wouldn’t wait, and he got that dreadful script with that dreadful ending instead. I’m not saying I could have cured the ending, I just don’t know. But the film didn’t work with that ending.
WELLER: You helped create a film appreciation society in Los Angeles. Can you tell me the history of that?
BRADBURY: I started it in 1960, I believe. I was on the board of the Writers Guild. I came to a meeting one night, and all the other members of the Guild—seven or eight members—were there. I said, “Last night, I saw this film.” They didn’t see it. Then I said, “Two nights ago, I saw that film.” They didn’t see it. I said, “Last Saturday, I saw this third film.” They didn’t see it. I said, “Jesus Christ, this is the screenwriters’ board. You’re the executive committee. Don’t you see films? That’s stupid!”
And the head of the Writers Guild said to me, “Ray, why don’t you start a film society and teach us?” I said, “I will, I will.” So everybody there made fun of me that night. I said, “Don’t make fun of me, I’ll found a film society. I’ll educate writers and change history.” So I turned to Ivan Moffat, who was a screenwriter standing next to me. I said, “Ivan, will you help me form this?” I turned to another writer, his name will come to me, and I said, “Will you help too?” So the three of us founded the film society and within two weeks we had two thousand members who joined by giving us ten dollars.
Over a period of five or six years we had two hundred thousand dollars in the bank from members because we got the films for free (the studios would give us the films), so we didn’t have
to rent them. So we put the money in the bank and when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got rid of their theater, we bought it. It was the Fox Theater, built in 1921. They moved into it. It was theirs at the Academy, and then I moved in with my group sometime around 1965. Before then, we were showing our films in the basement of a bank for about five years, then we moved over to the Fox Theater.
WELLER: Does the film society still operate today?
BRADBURY: Yes. It changed Hollywood. The film society has three thousand members right now.
WELLER: How did your friendship with King Vidor come about?
BRADBURY: Oh, he became my second father. We had retrospectives at the film society, and during that time the film historian Arthur Knight arranged for me to go to the premiere of Broken Blossoms with King Vidor, Lillian Gish, and Colleen Moore. And I’d seen Ms. Moore’s films when I was seven years old. So Colleen Moore became a good friend too.
I’d seen all of King Vidor’s films. I saw The Big Parade, starring John Gilbert, with my brother when I was five years old, and I’d seen Broken Blossoms and a record came out, “A Lady Picking Mulberries.” My mother bought that record when I was five years old. I put it on every day for a thousand days! I heard it all day for years. One time I was watching a screening of the film with King Vidor sitting beside me. This was back in 1977. They were doing the score with a live orchestra up in front of the theater, and I said, “My God! I know that tune! That’s ‘A Lady Picking Mulberries’! I played it every day when I was five years old.”
So I ran up to the conductor—it was Max Steiner, the composer’s son. I said, “Mr. Steiner, did you make a tape of this score today?” He says yes. I said, “Could you send me a copy?” And I told him my name, and luckily he knew my work and he sent me a tape. So I’ve got copies of the score of Broken Blossoms here and I can give it to people.
