Bradbury Speaks

by Ray Bradbury

  They lift their cameras, stare, and give a last despairing cry:

  “Holy shee-it!”

  One fast chorus of “Hooray for Hollywood!”

  BLACK OUT.

  For there is no Hollywood and Vine.

  Let me walk you through the ruins of that impossible loss that might soon be a possibility regained.

  Job One for January 1, 2001.

  But Hollywood, you protest, isn’t L.A. Like it or not, it is.

  How do you revamp Hollywood and Vine so it looks like Hollywood and Vine? With all its famous shops and cafés vanished, how can the intersection stand tall, resplendent, and symbolic of a terrific past but a diminishing future?

  It needs something to shock us with metaphor, perhaps not beautiful but at least redolent of 1900, 1939, 1980, and New Year’s A.D. 2020.

  Erase the Eiffel Tower, diminish Paris. Destroy Big Ben, London capsizes. No Taj Mahal? Forget India.

  We can’t fling up a tower, a clock, or a tomb. So … ?

  Let me suggest a small model.

  At the corner of Beverly Drive and Olympic in Beverly Hills stands a bronze monument, a twenty-foot-tall film scroll upflung to the sky. At its base, in bas-relief, stand vivid portraits of some of the stars who created Beverly Hills: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix, Rudolph Valentino, Harold Lloyd, and Will Rogers.

  What if we re-created a similar upthrust pylon at mid–Hollywood and Vine, but fifty feet tall, panoplied in gold, with the star bas-reliefs of others who created the Hollywood image? Make your own list. Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Cecil B. DeMille. A competition, perhaps, to recall the famous at the center of our lives, with the endlessly unwinding ribbon of film, lit as to make it seem endlessly in motion, rising, to vanish in the stars.

  With that grand reel of film flung to unspool itself in the heavens, wouldn’t the world’s tourists, arriving, shout, “Yeah! Hollywood and Vine, by God. At long last! Hollywood and Vine!”

  Still, that’s not L.A. Yes, it is! You just don’t want to admit it.

  Flinching back from that monument, what else can save Hollywood?

  Are we using its ruins creatively?

  Consider …

  Tour buses prowling its bleak avenues are hard-pressed to summon up some freshly laundered ghosts. Visitors from Kankakee, Birmingham, and Ossining peer out and snooze. Why?

  On Gower Street south of Sunset lie the old Columbia Studios. The soundstages remain, leased by tennis pros and badminton stars. On the sides of the old buildings lie a dozen empty billboards, thirty by twenty feet in size. They have stayed empty since Marilyn Monroe went away.

  Why not give the tour-bus riders a feast? Why not replaster those old billboards with wide-screen ads from our salad years?

  As you pass Columbia, look! What do you see? Above one frame: “In this soundstage in 1932 was filmed It Happened One Night.” On the billboard, giant-size Gable and Colbert, ripe for Academy Awards.

  Next soundstage, next billboard: “In this building, 1937, was filmed Lost Horizon.” There, godlike, an immense Ronald Colman in Shangri-la.

  Your tour bus almost jerks to a halt. Surprise!

  Moving on …

  A mile south on Gower, at Melrose, is the old RKO Studios, devoured by Desilu, devoured in turn by Paramount. Similar soundstages with similar empty billboards.

  Slow your tour bus:

  “In this building, 1932, was filmed King Kong.” There’s Kong atop the Empire State Building with Fay!

  “In this soundstage in 1935 was filmed The Gay Divorcee.” And Fred and Ginger up high, forever dancing.

  So? Gower from Sunset to Melrose is a hall of mirrors; flying down to Rio, hitchhiking across America, or floundering through Tibetan blizzards in an hour’s excursion, wouldn’t your tour-bus addicts stare and run rampant with delight? I say they would. I say they must and shall.

  So much for Hollywood. Now consider the rest of restless L.A.

  Some eighteen years ago, I was invited to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion one day to address the topic how to make theater popular with the peasants. Twenty—count ’em, twenty—famous orators were invited. People like Tom Brokaw; Philip Johnson, America’s preeminent architect; Judd Marmor, the bright head of USC’s school of psychiatry; plus seventeen others! Each had three minutes to expound, explain, and conclude. Three minutes each!? For Philip Johnson? Brokaw? Marmor? Myself as keynoter? Hell, let’s stuff Moby Dick in a sardine tin! Good grief, I cried, Philip Johnson should have the whole day! Tut! they said. Get out there!

  I exploded. What an insult to these talents! I cried, and ripped the skin off the day’s organizers.

  You want to popularize theater with the masses? I said. Your ticket prices are outrageous. Cut ’em! Parking prices for cars below, too high, cut! The cost of dining upstairs? Cut, cut. Do this! I said, and the mobs will storm Bunker Hill eager for O’Neill, ripe for Richard III!

  Mrs. Chandler, in the front row, was stunned, wide awake.

  Finished with my diatribe, I then redesigned all of downtown L.A., starting with the Music Center.

  Here we stand in these high battlements looking down at Mexico City Two, but no way to get there. Crossing Hope Street is dangerous. Under the street lies a porcelain path through men’s conveniences, which is to say, where the homeless, night and day, water the daisies. But before we leave this high place, we must refurbish the open esplanade between the pavilion, the Ahmanson, and the Taper. Why not invite attendees to arrive an hour before performances. Place a hundred tables and chairs out among small food banquettes and bars, serve light refreshments and twilight drinks, make it a social stage rather than a stone quarry.

  Then build a bridge over Hope Street so that pavilion visitors, music lovers, can amble down to that northern shore of Mexico. Once every half hour, have a tour guide mariachi sing a gaggle of the curious down to a Broadway freshly parqueted like Rio’s shoreline and follow this mosaic riverbed all the way to Olympic Boulevard, amid new streetlights, new storefronts, new paint, new glass, Mexico City Two reborn first class, then turn about and follow the mosaic pathway to Third, turn, and collide with Little Tokyo. Everything afoot. Those arriving at Little Tokyo by car would stash them and walk on to Olvera Street and Chinatown. How, with vast traffic boulevards between? Build a bridge of music and light to soar from Little Tokyo to land your wild pedestrians in the Zocalo. Then through Olvera on a street of lanterns hurrying toward Chinatown, a path teeming with textures, colors, and curiosities. Pedestrian traffic both ways, making the grand circuit from chow mein to enchilada to sushi!

  And all cars abandoned! No more tourists climbing in their cars to visit another country just two blocks away. Inevitably, instead of reparking, Dad rode the gang home. So General Lee’s to La Golondrina to Kyoto and repeat. Crowds return downtown! Street gangs? Policed. Warned away!

  I finished my tirade to a standing ovation and got the hell out, leaving Johnson, Marmor, and Brokaw to their midget three minutes. My rebuilt L.A. hit the morning headlines.

  Was my big two-hearted river of mosaics ever laid? Was that bridge from the Music Center ever arced to connect upper Bunker to lower Guadalajara?

  Five years later the pavilion folks finally laid out a few tables and chairs with food and liquor so that people could at last come chat at twilight, enjoy the heights, but shun Mexico a hill slope away.

  Don’t stop me. I’ve just begun!

  Why, you ask, do you keep beating that dead horse?

  Because L.A. isn’t dead, just lying low till we wake up!

  The future is Hollywood, the future is us, but we blush to acknowledge this as an insult.

  Think again: People don’t want White House tours but front-row seats at the Phantom’s Stage Nine Universal Opera House.

  They’ll land atop the Empire State Building, but only if Kong is there.

  They won’t sleep overnight in Frisco but bed at the Bates Motel and ask Hitch to tuck them in.

  They don’t want politicians but r
oyalty: Lassie, C3PO, the Cowardly Lion. Them, they trust.

  Add it up, Hollywood and Vine, Gower Street, downtown L.A., the big two-hearted river road through Tokyo, Guadalajara, and Peking, and you have a possible twenty-first century L.A.

  Hell, I yelled all this years ago. No one listened, dreamed, or built. Because I gave it all free? I should have charged half a mil for my two-bit city-plan philosophies. L.A. might have changed. Maybe.

  What else?

  When Century City was built thirty years ago, they showed me their plans. Won’t work, I said. Will, they said. Won’t! I said.

  They opened and flopped. Coming back to me, they said, Will you give more advice?!

  Read my lips, I said, two hundred open-air tables, nine hundred chairs for people-watching, thirty restaurants. The secret of shopping is eating! Twelve cinemas! A great bookstore! Go!

  They finally built the “Marketplace” restaurants, added the tables and chairs, and voilà! Century City entertains ten thousand eating shoppers each week!

  What can we learn from this?

  More outdoor restaurants spread through our vast and as-yet-untouched territory!

  What else?

  Reopen the Brown Derby just south of Hollywood Boulevard. No, not the original but a smaller tea and cocktail dive with all those fabulous star caricatures plastering the walls. A brief hideout where tourists can reconsider the past.

  Make sure that the Egyptian Theatre is finally renovated so that inch by inch, block by block, we reconquer a Hollywood that currently resembles downtown Hiroshima.

  Tell everyone about Larchmont Boulevard. Cars hurtling by on Beverly Boulevard rarely glance and spot this quiet, small shoppers’ delight. Shade trees, pleasant shop owners, nice clientele, great Christmas browsing. Does it need additions, perfecting? Look into it.

  Does everyone know Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax? An open-air fruit-and-vegetable movable-feast mall that has outlasted three generations.

  And finally, on New Year’s Day, 2001, let us pour ten thousand tons of cement in our never-should-have-been-started, never-to-be-finished subway for final rites. For its concept was always insane, its possible fares preposterous. Even if it were finished and opened, no one could afford to use it. Everyone has forgotten the experiment of a few years ago when bus fares were reduced to a basic twenty-five cents and one hundred to two hundred thousand new customers showed up to ride. Think how many cars that yanked off of freeways! No sooner was the experiment shown to be successful than it was canceled.

  So kill the subway and telephone Alweg Monorail to accept their offer, made thirty years ago, to erect twelve crosstown monorails free, gratis, if we let them run the traffic. I was there the afternoon our supervisors rejected that splendid offer and was thrown out of the meeting for making impolite noises.

  For remember, subways are for cold climes—snow and sleets in dead-winter London, Moscow, or Toronto. This is Mediterranean L.A., for God’s sake. Autumn, William Faulkner said, is when one leaf falls in Laurel Canyon. Monorails are for high, free, open-air spirits, our always fair weather. Subways are Forest Lawn extensions. Let’s bury our dead MTA and get on with life.

  There’s more, but I’ve run out of space.

  To recap:

  New Year’s Day, January 1, 2001, and a grand tour of the reshaped, revitalized, and reconceived L.A. as great as and greater than it ever was.

  Starting at dawn, being led downhill by a touring mariachi onto the Hispanic pavements of a refreshed Broadway, circling through Little Tokyo and crossing the Light and Sound Bridge to Olvera and then by lantern-lit alley to Chinatown, where throngs, long lost, rearrive, and thence out to Gower to stare up at Claudette Colbert, Ronald Colman, and Clark Gable blazoned on the old Columbia walls, and heading back at sunset to gape at the most famous star corner in all the world.

  And there in the center, an award to ourselves, handsomer than Emmy, more beautiful than Oscar, the golden film spiral that starts with robberies on speeding trains and treks to the stars, with clips of Garbo, Chaplin, and Rin Tin Tin in its thrust. Bright at noon, fiercely and permanently evanescent at midnight. A proper gathering ground for glad arrivals, happy departures.

  There at the center of the intersection, our award to ourselves and the destiny we did not imagine but now inhabit. Can someone give it a name? Speak up.

  HOLLYWOOD and VINE, oh, boy, yes. No more waiting.

  HOLLYWOOD AND VINE!

  DISNEYLAND, OR DISNEY’S DEMON FOR HAPPINESS (UNDATED)

  Some fifty years ago, I took my daughters to a kiddyland not far from my house. I wandered through this small environment with a Ferris wheel forty feet tall, a haunted house you could zip through in sixty-five seconds, and a roller coaster only seven feet high. The whole operation was run by some outré people who looked strange, sounded stranger, and smelled funny.

  Simultaneously, wandering through that small park was a man with a mustache and his kids. He departed from the experience wondering why in all of Los Angeles there was only one small area that played to the needs of parents and their children.

  In his office he experimented with mockups of possible rides and environments, using the talents of his artist friends. Finished, he borrowed millions of dollars on an experiment that everyone predicted would fail. His dream was finally built and opened against the doubts of everyone in the country, and the name of this dream created by the man with the mustache, for his kids, was …

  Disneyland.

  In the years following, in the midst of doubts, Disney proved that he had been infected by a Demon for Happiness. Surrounded by so much negativity, so much doubt, and so many strange places that looked odd, sounded odder, and gave off a high odor, he created a place where people could go and come forth smiling.

  He based his feelings on three things that he felt were lacking, which he wanted to supply. He wanted an environment of trees. Thousands of trees and bushes were not necessary, but he placed them in Disneyland anyway. What about fountains? Who needed them? But he stationed them in Disneyland anyway. Was there a real need for extra benches where people could sit and people-watch? He placed those things strategically.

  Studying Disneyland, you suddenly realize how much the New York World’s Fair in 1964 could have used his input to make that experience an easy and wonderful one for all those who attended.

  Disney knew from the start that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who enjoy happiness and people who hate it.

  I was reminded of a dinner I attended years ago in which when I finished I said, “That was a beautiful meal.” Someone across from me said, “No, that was good.” So there you have the two kinds of people, who accept or who are afraid of happiness. Disney was among the first to challenge the notion that we should be afraid of happiness. On the contrary, we must embrace and celebrate it!

  My first experience at Disneyland, happily, was with Charles Laughton. He flew me over London at midnight so I could look down on Big Ben, and during the day Laughton boarded the Jungle Boat ride and became Captain Bligh, keelhauling people and shouting orders right and left.

  At that time there were many articles in intellectual gazettes making fun of Disneyland. I wrote a letter to one of them saying, “If it’s good enough for the great dramatic actor Charles Laughton it’s good enough for me.”

  During one period in the late sixties, several people tried to set fire to Disneyland. These were those joyless people who suspected any happiness.

  Simply recall the reaction of some New Yorkers to Disney’s invasion of Times Square. There were predictions that he would ruin the city by making it too clean. What happened, of course, was that the Disney people improved Times Square, rebuilt one of the old theaters, and put on one of the most successful musicals in history, The Lion King.

  Finally, then, it is quite obvious that Disneyland is a place for people from all over the world to come and bring their private Demons, those Demons that are not afraid of happiness, to allow them f
reedom and give them air.

  I end with one final story. I was crossing Disneyland one afternoon some years ago, and walking toward me the other way I saw a small girl in a bright blue-and-white dress, with long golden hair. As she approached and stopped before me, I looked at her and said:

  “Alice in Wonderland?”

  She looked at me and said:

  “Ray Bradbury?”

  ESSAY SOURCES

  “Vin Revivere or A Vintage Revisited” first appeared in the June 1991 issue of Gourmet under the title “Dandelion Wine Revisited”; copyright © 1991 by Ray Bradbury.

  “How Something Wicked Came” first appeared as “A Brief Afterword” in Something Wicked This Way Comes, Avon Books, 1998; copyright © 1996 by Ray Bradbury.

  “All’s Well That Ends Well … or, Unhappily Ever After” first appeared in the March 21, 2003, issue of the Times Daily; copyright © 2003 by Ray Bradbury.

  “Remembrance of Books Past” first appeared in the February 2, 2004, issue of the Wall Street Journal; © 2004 by Ray Bradbury.

  “Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future” first appeared in the January 2001 issue of Hemispheres; copyright © 2001 by Ray Bradbury.

  “Mars: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars” first appeared in the September 2000 issue of Space Illustrated as “Too Soon from the Cave”; copyright © 2000 by Ray Bradbury.

  “Earthrise and Its Faces” first appeared in Infinite Perspectives, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999; copyright © 1999 by Ray Bradbury.

  “Falling Upward, or Walking Backward to the Future” first appeared in the March 1999 issue of Interior Expressions as “Falling Upward”; copyright © 1999 by Ray Bradbury.

  “Beyond Giverny” first appeared in the March 15, 1994, issue of American Way; copyright © 1994 by Ray Bradbury.

  “More, Much More, by Corwin” first appeared in the July/August 1999 issue of Westways as “The Corwin Chronicles”; copyright © 1999 by Ray Bradbury.

  “Because of the Wonderful Things He Does” first appeared in Wonderful Wizard of Oz, University of Kansas Press, 1999; copyright © 1999 by Ray Bradbury.