Ray Bradbury
Raymond Douglas “Ray” Bradbury (August 22, 1920) is an American mainstream, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury is widely considered one of the greatest and most popular American writers of speculative fiction of the twentieth century. Ray Bradbury’s popularity has been increased by more than 20 television shows and films using his writings.
From 1951 to 1954, 27 of Bradbury’s stories were adapted by Al Feldstein for EC Comics, and 16 of these were collected in the paperbacks, The Autumn People (1965) and Tomorrow Midnight (1966). Cover art for both books was done by famed fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. The reprints were published by Ballantine Books.
Also in the early 1950s, adaptations of Bradbury’s stories were televised on a variety of shows including Tales of Tomorrow, Lights Out, Out There, Suspense, CBS Television Workshop, Jane Wyman’s Fireside Theatre, Star Tonight, Windows, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. “The Merry-Go-Round,” a half-hour film adaptation of Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris,” praised by Variety, was shown on Starlight Summer Theater in 1954 and NBC’s Sneak Preview in 1956.
It Came From Outer Space (1953)
Director Jack Arnold first brought Bradbury to movie theaters in 1953 with It Came from Outer Space, a Harry Essex screenplay developed from Bradbury’s screen treatment, “The Meteor”. Three weeks later, Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), based on Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn,” about a sea monster mistaking the sound of a fog horn for the mating cry of a female, was released. Bradbury’s close friend Ray Harryhausen produced the stop-motion animation of the creature. Bradbury would later return the favor by writing a short story, “Tyrannosaurus Rex”, about a stop-motion animator who strongly resembled Harryhausen. Over the next 50 years, more than 35 features, shorts, and TV movies were based on Bradbury’s stories or screenplays.
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Oskar Werner and Julie Christie starred in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), an adaptation of Bradbury’s novel directed by François Truffaut.
In 1969, The Illustrated Man was brought to the big screen, starring Oscar winner Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, & Robert Drivas. Containing the prologue, and three short stories from the book, the film received mediocre reviews.
The Martian Chronicles became a three-part TV miniseries starring Rock Hudson which was first broadcast by NBC in 1980.
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The 1983 horror film Something Wicked This Way Comes, starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce, is based on the Bradbury novel of the same name.
In 1984, Michael McDonough of Brigham Young University produced “Bradbury 13,” a series of thirteen audio adaptations of famous Ray Bradbury stories, in conjunction with National Public Radio. The full-cast dramatizations featured adaptations of “The Man,” “The Ravine,” “Night Call, Collect,” “The Veldt,” “Kaleidoscope,” “There Was an Old Woman,” “Here There Be Tygers,” “Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed,” “The Wind,” “The Fox and the Forest,” “The Happiness Machine,” “The Screaming Woman”, and “A Sound of Thunder”. Voiceover actor Paul Frees provided narration, while Bradbury himself was responsible for the opening voiceover; Greg Hansen and Roger Hoffman scored the episodes. The series won a Peabody Award as well as two Gold Cindy awards. The series has not yet been released on CD but is heavily traded by fans of “old time radio”.
From 1985 to 1992 Bradbury hosted a syndicated anthology television series, The Ray Bradbury Theater, for which he adapted 65 of his stories. Each episode would begin with a shot of Bradbury in his office, gazing over mementoes of his life, which he states (in narrative) are used to spark ideas for stories.
Five episodes of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World adapted Ray Bradbury’s stories I Sing The Body Electric, Fahrenheit 451, A Piece of Wood, To the Chicago Abyss, and Forever and the Earth. A Soviet adaptation of “The Veldt” was filmed in 1987.
The 1998 film The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, released by Touchstone Pictures, was written by Ray Bradbury. It was based on his story “The Magic White Suit” originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1957. The story had also previously been adapted as a play, a musical, and a 1958 television version.
In 2002, Bradbury’s own Pandemonium Theatre Company production of Fahrenheit 451 at Burbank’s Falcon Theatre combined live acting with projected digital animation by the Pixel Pups. In 1984 Telarium released a video game for Commodore 64 based on Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury and director Charles Rome Smith co-founded Pandemonium in 1964, staging the New York production of The World of Ray Bradbury (1964), adaptations of “The Pedestrian,” “The Veldt”, and “To the Chicago Abyss.”
In 2005, the film A Sound of Thunder was released, loosely based upon the short story of the same name. Short film adaptations of A Piece of Wood and The Small Assassin were released in 2005 and 2007 respectively.
In 2008, the film Ray Bradbury’s Chrysalis was produced by Roger Lay Jr for Urban Archipelago Films, based upon the short story of the same name. The film went on to win the best feature award at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix. The film has been picked up for international distribution by Arsenal Pictures and for domestic distribution by Lightning Entertainment.
A new film version of Fahrenheit 451 is being planned by director Frank Darabont.
Trivia:
Father of 4 daughters: Susan, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra.
Son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, linesman with the Waukegan Bureau of Power and Light, and of Esther Marie Moberg.
He wrote the original manuscript of “Fahrenheit 451″ on a rented typewriter in a public library, from handwritten notes and outlines. It first appeared in print in a shortened form (of about 25,000 words) in Galaxy magazine and later in its present length but in serial format in the just starting out Playboy magazine.
Though considered by many to be the greatest science-fiction writer of the of the 20th century, he suffers from a fear of flying and driving. He has never learned to drive, and did not fly in an airplane until October, 1982.
National Public Radio’s “Bradbury 13″ (1984) was a 13-episode program based on many of his stories.
Recipient of a 2004 National Medal of Arts, awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts (USA).
There is a noted irony in the names of two characters in his novel “Fahrenheit 451″: “Montag” is also the name of a paper mill and “Faber” is a manufacturer of pencils. Ray Bradbury insists that this was unintentional.
His original title for one of his novels was ‘the Fireman’. He called his local fire department and asked them what the temperature at which paper burns at – and was told “451 Fahrenheit”. He reversed it to make it the title of his novel ‘Fahrenheit 451′.
He is the great-great-great grandson of Mary Bradbury, a woman who was tried in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, but saved herself from being hanged for witchcraft.
He had a series of short stories which his publisher said would never sell, so he linked the stories together, while living at a local YMCA, and created the novel, “The Martian Chronicles.” He was paid just $500 for the story.
He voiced his displeasure at documentary filmmaker Michael Moore for appropriating the title of his book “Fahrenheit 451″ for the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). However, Bradbury himself is the author of “Beyond 1984″ (title appropriated from George Orwell’s “1984″) and “Another Tale of Two Cities” (title appropriated from Charles Dickens ”A Tale of Two Cities”).
As a bedtime story for each of his daughters, he read (in nightly installments) “Hound of the Baskervilles” by Arthur Conan Doyle.
As a young boy, a friend once ridiculed his collection of science fiction and comic books, and heckled him into throwing them away. A day later, Bradbury was heartbroken, feeling that he had trashed his best friends. He immediately rebuilt his collection!.
Says that he remembers being born.
He and famed animator Chuck Jones have been close friends for more than 50 years.
In Chaplin’s Goliath (1996), a documentary about silent film star Eric Campbell, the Rosedale Cemetary spokeswoman mistakenly claims Ray Bradbury is interred there.
A hero of his was the Italian director Federico Fellini. When they first met, as Bradbury claims, Fellini ran up to Bradbury, embraced him, and said ‘My twin! My Twin’ They became great friends but never collaborated on any projects.
