Bradbury Speaks

by Ray Bradbury

  “You have more than my permission,” I said. “Go!”

  He went and came back a month later, crestfallen.

  “No takers, no money,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I’m honored that you tried.”

  With the screen treatment dead, a novel came alive. The idea refused to lie dormant. In the next five years, I transformed the film script into a three-hundred-page novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

  The novel, finished, had rough going. It was rejected by Doubleday, who had published six of my books. I was forced to move on and sold the novel to Simon & Schuster, whose editor, Bob Gottlieb, became a moving force in my life.

  Even rougher, the book was optioned by a series of studios and producers. I wrote at least three new screenplays for those studios and got caught in a power war at Paramount Studios, where Barry Diller and Michael Eisner disagreed as to whether the script would sink or swim. The wrangling went on just long enough that I picked up my screenplay and canceled the obligation.

  At which point Sam Peckinpah appeared, expressing interest.

  “How would you film Something Wicked?” I asked.

  “Rip the pages out of your novel,” said Sam, “and stuff them in the camera!”

  I scanned the chapters of my book, staring, and he was right. The pages were scenes, the paragraphs were long shots or close-ups. “Sam—” I said.

  But he was gone.

  I wish he had stayed. I often wonder what kind of film he would have made of my midnight shadow show.

  The film of Something Wicked This Way Comes was finally finished and previewed in 1983. The preview was a disaster. My director, against my wishes, had thrown out my screenplay and substituted one written by a British writer who understood Evelyn Waugh but misapprehended fantasy.

  My daughters, attending the terrible preview, called me the next day saying, “Daddy, what happens next?”

  “I’m waiting for the phone to ring,” I said.

  It rang. The head of the studio asked me to come over. When I walked into his office, he said, “I hope you’re not going to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

  “There’s no time for that,” I said. “Rebuild the sets, rehire the actors, I’ll write an opening narration and hire a composer for a new score.”

  The studio spent $5 million in three weeks’ shooting, to bring the film back to life. It was released in 1983 to mostly good-to-fine reviews, not a great film, no, but a decently nice one.

  The original screenplay and the published novel remain. Thank God for that. No, come to think of it, thank Gene Kelly for that.

  LINCOLN’S DOCTOR’S DOG’S BUTTERFLY (UNDATED)

  Several years ago producer David Merrick called Stan Freberg, who was working on a musical history of the United States, sat him down, and said, “Take Abe Lincoln out of the war. He doesn’t work.”

  A similar thing occurred yesterday. My story “A Sound of Thunder,” published in Collier’s magazine fifty years ago, concerns a group of time travelers out to hunt dinosaurs.

  They are warned not to fall off a path laid to prevent them from inadvertently crushing wildlife, which would change time and history.

  One of the hunters, panicked by a tyrannosaurus, falls and kills a butterfly with his heel.

  When the time travelers return to the future, they find that when the hunter killed the butterfly, it changed the entire history of insects. Arriving in 2004, they find that a totalitarian government has seized the world. All because of that one butterfly.

  This year I’ve been working with a film company to film the story. The director and the writers have worked on a screenplay for eighteen months.

  But just this week the director announced, “Why don’t we take the butterfly out of the story?”

  I heard this with great shouts of laughter.

  God, I thought, here we go again! The story has been published in eighty anthologies, read by millions of students in ten thousand schools. If you shot a film minus the butterfly, there would be pandemonium.

  Fortunately, the producers have hired a new director with a new script and a new schedule, and the butterfly has been rehired. We shoot the film in March.

  Now, consider my film Fahrenheit 451, directed by François Truffaut in 1966, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, with a brilliant score by Bernard Herrmann, but with some missing elements.

  Recently Mel Gibson said, “Let’s remake the film and put back all the missing pieces.”

  So I sold him the rights to Fahrenheit 451 and wrote one screenplay. They then ordered nine more screenplays in the following years, none of which I ever saw.

  Finally an Atlanta bookstore mailed me one of the screenplays that they had somehow snitched, and wrote, “We think that you might want to see this.”

  After several fearful days I finally opened the screenplay to page 45 just for the hell of it and found a scene where the fire chief, Beatty, visits Montag, the fireman.

  When Beatty enters Montag’s home, Montag’s wife, Mildred, says, “Would you like to have some coffee?”

  The fire chief responds, “Do bears shit in the woods?”

  There was a long silence on my part.

  Then I closed the screenplay.

  I never read the rest.

  Fortunately, amid my despair, Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption, acquired the rights from Mel Gibson and will write and direct the new version of Fahrenheit 451 next year.

  He assures me that he will not hire any bears!

  Now, on to my experience with The Illustrated Man thirty years ago. When I was sure that Rod Steiger and his wife, Claire Bloom, would star, I sold Warner Bros. the rights.

  At no time did Warner Bros. tell me what was going on in preproducing the film.

  One day in the summer of 1969, I had business at NBC Studios with Harry Belafonte, with whom I was writing a musical adaptation of “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.”

  Finished with Belafonte, I glanced across the street and said, “Well, there’s Warner Brothers. Why don’t I go see what’s happening.”

  I arrived at the studio to discover that it was the first day of filming The Illustrated Man and no one had bothered to tell me. By accident I had my picture taken with Rod Steiger, laid out on a makeup table, having his body illustrated.

  With the film finished, I learned that it had been written by a real estate agent from New Jersey.

  A real estate agent from New Jersey!

  The screenplay began in the middle of “The Veldt” rather than at the beginning, so that all suspense was gone. Then a dozen four-letter words exploded. The film could not be shown to my young readers, who, by the millions, had read the story in schools.

  On the night of the premiere of The Illustrated Man, I arrived to see lines of fans around the block waiting to see their favorite book.

  My heart sank.

  When the film was over, a small boy stared into my face and cried, “Mr. Bradbury, what happened?”

  Tears welled in my eyes. “My dear child,” I said, “you’ll never know.”

  This year I’ve finished a new script of The Illustrated Man to be produced by Columbia TriStar. I’m quite proud of the script I’ve delivered; it doesn’t smell of real estate or New Jersey.

  Two weeks ago Columbia TriStar called and said, “We like your script, but we must hire a new writer to come give it a polish.”

  In my mind I thought, What kind of polish? S—— or Shinola!?

  I recall my experience at Universal forty-five years ago when I wrote a story called It Came from Outer Space. I warned the studio that they shouldn’t bring the aliens, the creatures from another world, out into the light.

  When the film was previewed, my God, what had they done but bring the aliens fully out into the sunlight—not terrifying but hilarious.

  Several years ago 20th Century Fox called me in and asked me to write a screenplay about an Egyptian princess. They gave me a copy
of Emil Ludwig’s Cleopatra and asked my opinion. After looking at this tremendous volume, I realized that for all the supposed knowledge it contained, very little was known about Cleopatra.

  I went back to 20th and suggested to them that while I couldn’t do the screenplay, I had two authors to recommend to them.

  They said, “Who?”

  I replied, “Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.”

  The 20th Century Fox producers were shocked; they thought I was joking.

  I said, “No, take Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and put them together, and you might have a remarkable film.” At which point I left the studio.

  Not long after, I was employed at MGM doing a screenplay, of The Martian Chronicles, at which time I predicted that three days after turning in my screenplay, I would be fired.

  Along the way they were producing Mutiny on the Bounty at the studio. I had a chance to visit the set and watch my friend, Sir Carol Reed, try to make do with Marlon Brando.

  Every evening at five o’clock, Sir Carol came to my office, closed the door, fell back against it, eyes closed, and moaned, “Oh, Ray, oh, Ray!” He couldn’t possibly tell me the problems he was going through working on The Bounty with Brando.

  One day I visited the set and saw that everybody looked incredibly happy. I thought, My God, I bet they fired Sir Carol Reed as a result of the trouble with Brando and have got a new director. Sure enough, Lewis Milestone was hired, and within days he and Brando were fighting.

  In the midst of all this, the studio came to me and asked me to take over revising and finishing the screenplay of Mutiny on the Bounty. Recalling what I had seen on the set and remembering Sir Carol leaning against my door, eyes shut, moaning “Oh, Ray, oh, Ray!” I turned down the offer.

  In the years since both films have come out, I’ve had recurrent nightmares in which Cleopatra’s barge sails down Motor Avenue one way and the Bounty sails up Motor Avenue the other way to collide in front of my house and sink out of sight, taking the two studios with them.

  Well, that’s it. Here, then, we have the story of Abraham Lincoln. With Stan Freberg, I hope to get Lincoln put back into the Civil War.

  Then next month I’m placing an ad in Variety to stash my butterfly properly under heel in A Sound of Thunder.

  THE WHALE, THE WHIM, AND I (UNDATED)

  Who in hell in all the world could possibly write the screenplay of Moby Dick?

  There is only one answer—

  Herman Melville.

  And since Melville had come ashore a few score years before my birth and buried himself alive in the customs sheds and was soon buried in the very earth itself, you have an author obstinate to offers. He will not, would not, cannot write the script for the proposed film.

  What then?

  Hold séances with the miscreant author? Plant the ouija board as funnel above my typewriter? Play Scrabble with his phantom self, hoping that he will nudge you a few words?

  None of that.

  What’s left?

  To become Herman Melville. Somehow tailor his clothes to your shape and his flesh to your flesh, and tuck his mind, in one eye and out the other, till it’s sewn through your head, again and again.

  Which is what I set out to do. It has been the problem, of course, of all the adapters of all novels. But your average novel is a tintype compared with the undersea mountain range of old Herman, where the Great Fish ambles along past the profiles of Roosevelt, Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson.

  In the past the screenwriters who worked for John Barrymore’s Ahab simply ran along the shore, ankle-deep, not daring to wade out and risk drowning. The result was, of course, not depth, and two films wrecked in the shallows.

  It is all too much.

  My God, if you shot all nine hundred pages, you’d wind up with a fourteen-hour film. Great stuff for those weekend family film picnics in China or India. But in America, where Stan Freberg was soon to do his one-minute radio capsule of Moby Dick … ?

  The seventy-minute film dominated the twenties. The 80- and 90-minute films grew through the thirties and forties, to wind up with the 120-minute show of the sixties. How then to dwarf a whale and miniaturize his carcass?

  Let’s face it, adapting any other writer to the screen, or into any other form, is all but impossible. Unless by sheer genetic accident, you are born with the chromosomes, the brain spheres, the fingerprints of—

  Faulkner, Hemingway, Balzac, or name your own writer.

  There are similarities in writers’ natures, and if you as a screenwriter were born leaning into Steinbeck long before he began to write, so much the better. I have always felt I could adapt Steinbeck not because I was able to do so but because I was Steinbeck. That’s a whole different corral of horses. And it doesn’t happen every day to every writer.

  Melville is something else again. You might as well say you are going to adapt the Andes, script the Himalayas, do a quick rundown on the Antarctic floes, follow a locust scourge south or a swarm of trout in forty streams heading north up some impossible falls. You are never going to thimble-size Katmandu or run the British royal family through your sieve and out your fingers. What, swim across the Atlantic? Cross Russia barefoot in winter?

  And yet, impossible as it seems, it must be done. The screenwriter sets out to masquerade for a few months, in the flesh, and look out the eyes of some author.

  I did just that. Did I succeed? For a few hours on a particular morning in London in April of 1954, yes. I lived inside Melville’s skin. How well did I live there? Others must answer.

  How did I achieve a moment’s visitation?

  By reading some parts of Melville two hundred times, other parts ninety times, still other parts thirty or forty times. Some parts only six or seven times; my instinct told me that this or that page, that or this chapter, would not be grist for the whaling mills. Or blubber, if you wish, for the tryworks.

  All I remember now is that on the morning of April 7, as far as I can recall it, I awoke in a terrible state of excitement. I imagine it was like those moments we hear about before an earthquake, when perhaps the dogs and cats fight to leave the house or the unseen, unheard tremors shake the floor and beams and you find yourself held ready for something to arrive but you’re damned if you know what.

  What arrived, of course, was the inventor, owner, and operator, but above all the dreamer, of Moby Dick.

  On other mornings I had ordered breakfast.

  This morning I got out of bed, stared at my typewriter across the room, and marched toward it. On the way I caught a glimpse of my disheveled self.

  Now, there is no way for this pink, round face to look insane, lunatic crazy or reasonably mad, if there is reason to madness. What I saw was some sort of purpose, I imagine. A possible raving dedication that would last, if I took advantage, a few hours, never to come again.

  I made a declaration to myself in the mirror:

  “I,” I cried, “am Herman Melville!”

  And, believing it, I sat down at the typewriter and in the next five to six to seven hours rewrote the last third of the screenplay, plus portions of the middle. I did not eat until long after the lunch hour, when I had a sandwich sent up and which I devoured while typing. I was fearful of answering the telephone, dreading the loss of focus if I did so. I have never typed so long, so hard, so fast, in all the years before that day and all the years since. If I wasn’t Herman Melville, I was at least, by God, his ouija board, and he was moving my planchette. Or his literary force, compressed all these months, was spouting out my fingertips as if I had turned on all faucets. I mumbled and muttered and mourned and yelled through the morning, all through noontime, and leaning into my usual nap time. But there was no tiredness, only the fierce and steady and joyful and triumphant banging away at my machine with the pages littering the floor and Ahab crying destruction over the right shoulder and old Herman bawling instruction over the left.

  What was happening, of course, loo
king back, was that at last the metaphors were falling together, meeting up, touching, and then fusing, the tiny ones with the small ones, the smaller with the larger, and the larger with the immense. Episodes separated by scenes and pages were rearranging themselves like a series of Chinese cups, at first collapsed and then expanding to hold more water or in this case, by God, wine from Melville’s cellar. In some instances I borrowed paragraphs or entire chapters from back of the book to move front, or scenes from the middle to the half rear, or scenes tending toward midway to be saved for finales to larger scenes.

  What nailed it was the nailing of the Spanish gold ounce to the mast. If I hadn’t fastened on that for starters, the other metaphors, like pilot fish and minnows and shark followers and sharks, might not have surfaced to swim in the bleached shadow of the Whale. This sounds like fancy talk. Well, let it. Since that day I have advised all writers, on sea or ashore, Capture the big metaphor first; all the rest will rise to follow. Don’t bother with the sardines when the leviathan looms. He will suction them in by the billions once he is yours.

  Well, the gold coin, small as it seems, is a very largish symbol. It embodies all that the seamen want, along with what Ahab insanely desires above all. He wants the men’s souls, and while his soul is dedicated to the destruction of Moby Dick, he is wildly wise to know and use the gold ounce as summons and reward.

  Thus, the ship’s maul and the pounded nail and the bright sun symbol of power and reward banged to the mast with the promise that gold will pour from Moby Dick’s wounds into their outreached cupping hands. Their religious fervor for minted gold runs in the invisible traces of Ahab’s equally religious fervor for the true wounds and the true blood of the Beast.

  The men do not know it, but the sound they hear of the maul striking the coin’s fastening nail is their sea coffin’s lid being hammered flat shut.

  When Ahab shouts that the first man up who spies the Whale will earn this ounce, a man scrambles to obey.

  No sooner fallen than his body is eaten by the sea, which is to say he returns not. The sea is hungry. And the sea is owned by the White Whale. You cannot buy or beggar it.