by Sam Weller
As his friendship with Joe Mugnaini blossomed, Ray became more determined than ever to work with the artist. “We got drunk a lot,” Ray recalled with a laugh. But well beyond being drinking buddies, they respected each other’s art. “Ray has always been a very open, very enthusiastic sort of guy,” said Mugnaini. “It’s impossible to talk to him without becoming enthused yourself.”
Ray and Mugnaini discussed a picture book based on Ray’s concept of a malevolent carnival arriving in a midwestern town. The book, as they envisioned it, was a precursor to the modern graphic novel. But the two men had other projects. Ray recommended Mugnaini to Walter Bradbury, and the artist was commissioned to illustrate the cover of The Golden Apples of the Sun. “I told Joe what the book was about and showed him some of the stories and asked him if he could do the cover for me. Maybe come up with one or two samples,” explained Ray. “He came back with twelve samples. He was that energetic. That was Joe. All the cover designs were so beautiful I couldn’t pick one, but I finally selected the art that you see on the cover of the first edition.”
Walter Bradbury and the design department at Doubleday were equally impressed. Ray had high hopes to have Mugnaini do individual black-and-white illustrations for each story, and Doubleday agreed. While The Golden Apples of the Sun did not have a unified narrative thread like The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, it did have a visual uniformity through Mugnaini’s stunning pen-and-ink line drawings; each story in the book opened with a black-and-white interpretation. As the artist recalled, he did all the work for $250. With this one book, the distinctive visual art of Joe Mugnaini became synonymous with the unique literary art of Ray Bradbury.
During the summer of 1952, Ray received a call from film producer Hal Chester to come for a meeting at Warner Brothers studio. Chester had a screenplay in development and had procured the talents of Ray’s friend Ray Harryhausen to supervise the stop-motion animation effects. Like Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen had been making dramatic career inroads, fast becoming a legend in the field of visual effects. From the beginning of their friendship, Ray Bradbury wanted nothing more than to work with his dear friend and best man, Ray Harryhausen. “We could talk for hours over the telephone,” recalled Harryhausen about the early days of their friendship. “We wanted to make a great dinosaur movie together. We would sort of pitch ideas back and forth. I was going to animate them and he was going to write the script. The ideas never matured, but it was fun.”
Ray now had an opportunity to work with his friend. He was eager to meet with Hal Chester and, on the day of their meeting, Chester handed Ray the screenplay and asked him to read it on the spot. He told Ray that if he liked the script, he could revise it or even rewrite the entire thing. Chester wanted Ray Bradbury in on his project, and Ray Bradbury wanted to team up with Ray Harryhausen. Ray agreed to read the screenplay immediately, and was shown to an adjacent room. After reading the first twenty pages, Ray was incredulous. The script featured a dinosaur encountering a lighthouse. It was straight out of his short story “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which had run in the Saturday Evening Post a year earlier. The screenplay had plagiarized Ray Bradbury. “After reading the script,” Ray said, “I went out and Hal Chester said, ‘What do you think? Would you be interested in working on this screenplay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I would, but, incidentally, there’s a slight resemblance to my story ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.’” Hal Chester was mortified. “His jaw dropped, his eyes bugged, his wig turned around three times, and then I realized that someone in the studio had ‘borrowed’ my idea and written the script. Then they had called me in, forgetting where they had borrowed the idea, and asked me to rewrite it.”
Ray agreed to consider the offer to work on the script, even with the apparent lifting of his idea. As with his experience with EC Comics, at first Ray chalked up the entire incident to inadvertent plagiarism and let the matter slide. If anything, it showed that his stories were being noticed by other creators. Ray told Chester to be in touch, and left. “The next day I got a telegram from them asking to buy the rights to my story,” said Ray. “I didn’t have to threaten them or anything. They got the hint when I dropped the safe on them.”
On July 3, 1952, Hal Chester’s company, Mutual Pictures of California, bought the rights to “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” for $750. Oddly, after selling the story rights, Ray had no further involvement with the production of the film. After making the initial offer, Chester never hired Ray to rewrite the script, and Ray never asked why he was passed over. “I think they called me in that day to test me, I guess,” conjectured Ray, “to see if I realized that there was plagiarism. I just don’t know.” While he lost the opportunity to work on a motion picture with Ray Harryhausen, the two friends would still be linked in the credits of the film: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms—Story by Ray Bradbury, Animation Effects by Ray Harryhausen.
While one cinematic opportunity slipped away, another presented itself. Ray was approached by Universal Pictures in the summer of 1952 to develop a monster movie. Ray, however, had loftier ambitions. It is no surprise that the young man who had brought mainstream respectability to the fields of science fiction and fantasy with The Martian Chronicles had high hopes of crafting an outline that elevated beyond the ghetto of the kitschy 1950s monster spectacle. Ray offered to write two different versions of the film, tentatively titled, as he recalled, The Meteor. One would be an outline in keeping with the studio’s wishes—a stereotypical story of a malevolent space creature attacking Earth. But he would also proffer an alternative. “I wanted to treat the invaders as beings who were not dangerous, and that was very unusual,” Ray said. “The only other film like it was The Day the Earth Stood Still, two years before. These two films stand out as treating creatures who understand humanity. The studio picked the right concept and I stayed on.”
Ray went to work at Universal in late August, earning three hundred dollars a week. Monday through Friday, he took the morning bus from his home in West Los Angeles to the Universal lot, on the other side of the hills in Universal City. It was an hour-long commute each way. “I was used to riding the bus back then,” Ray said. “So I filled the time writing stories inside my head.” At Universal, Ray shared bungalow 10, a modest two-office cottage, with screenwriter Sam Rolfe, who in 1954 would receive an Oscar nomination for his work on the western The Naked Spur.
In the six weeks Ray spent at Universal, he drafted several outlines—richly detailed screen treatments—that quickly became the story It Came from Outer Space. “I got carried away by my emotions,” Ray said of his explosion of prolificacy while at Universal. Original working titles for the film were The Meteor and Atomic Monster.
At noon each day, Ray took his sack lunch, walked the back lot of the film studio, and stopped at the faux Main Street, America. The set of quaint, charming houses conjured warm memories of his Illinois childhood. “There was an entire street, just like the street in Waukegan where I was born,” Ray recalled. “And there was a house very much like my grandparents’ house, and I sat on the front steps of the porch and had my lunch.”
During his time at Universal, Ray wrote four drafts of film treatments. “I basically wrote a screenplay,” he recalled. His writing went far beyond the parameters of the normal, present-tense, narrative film treatment. The final 111-page outline, completed in early October, was heavy on dialogue and camera direction, and it featured his own unmistakable language and “Bradburian” description. It was a point-by-point, scene-by-scene blueprint for a writer to adapt into script form. According to Ray, because he had no screenwriting experience, the studio decision makers had little confidence in him actually writing the script, but he had conceptualized and produced a detailed outline. Writer Harry Essex was hired to write the final script. Given the level of detail in Bradbury’s treatment, the job was a simple one for Essex. “Harry just retyped my treatment. He added things, of course, because it wasn’t complete, but he was very open,” said Ray. “He told
people this. He said, ‘Ray Bradbury wrote a screenplay and called it a treatment.’”
It Came from Outer Space was not released until May 25, 1953. When it finally reached the silver screen, it was immediately recognized as a groundbreaking work of 1950s science fiction paranoia, echoing the burgeoning national obsession with Martians, flying saucers, and incidents like the alleged 1947 crash of an alien craft in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico. Ray Bradbury’s story capitalized on the waxing cultural interest in little green men. But instead of rehashing the tired cliché of an intergalactic monster set to devour civilization, he flipped the space-invader genre on its collective ear by portraying human beings as the real villains of the story.
BY 1952, Ray Bradbury had grown increasingly disenchanted with the American political climate. While Norman Corwin, Sid Stebel, and many of Ray’s other friends at the time did not recall having regular political discussions with Ray, he was a steadfast liberal Democrat in the early 1950s. In 1952, he even volunteered for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign, going door-to-door, handing out political literature, shaking hands, attempting to persuade strangers to vote Democrat. Over the years, Ray’s political leanings had led to more than one heated exchange with his father, whose own ideology landed somewhere on the other end of the spectrum. Throughout the war years, Ray had been an ardent supporter of President Roosevelt. Leo Bradbury, on the other hand, disparaged FDR. When World War Two ended and the 1940s wound to a close, an alarming new political trend reared its ugly head and it concerned Ray Bradbury very much. As the Communist-governed Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to postconflict adversary over the newly drawn boundaries of Germany, a witch hunt was under way in the United States, spearheaded by an as yet little-known U.S. government entity, the House Un-American Activities Committee.
First established in 1938 to identify subversive individuals and organizations, after the Second World War the committee was given increased authority by President Truman, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Attorney General Tom Clark. A “Red Scare” was sweeping America. It was the dawn of the Cold War, and in 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee set its sights on Hollywood, probing for Communist influences in the motion picture industry. Led by Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, the committee stopped at nothing to expose alleged Communists lurking within film studio walls. Fearing for their careers, looking to backstab old enemies, or simply surrendering to national hysteria, many tongues in the film industry began wagging to government investigators. With no proof whatsoever, fingers were pointed in the direction of suspected Communist sympathizers. Not everyone in Hollywood was intimidated. Prominent cinematic luminaries such as Humphrey Bogart, Jane Wyatt, Billy Wilder, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, and Burt Lancaster decried the committee’s goon-squad tactics. Many took out ads in Hollywood trade magazines in opposition to the government’s activities. John Huston, then vice president of the Screen Directors Guild, was also a vocal opponent of the government’s Communist- trawling expedition.
“In my estimation,” said Huston, “Communism was nothing as compared to the evil done by the witch hunters. They were the real enemies of this country. And what made it so bizarre, so unbelievable, was the fact that the worst offenders against all that this country stands for were members of a committee of the Congress of the United States, who had sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.”
Yet even as Hollywood’s elite stood up to the bullying tactics of the committee, the end result of the shakedown was a blacklisting that reverberated throughout the film industry. Nineteen writers, directors, and actors found their careers in tatters. Many more were forced to work under pseudonyms or to move overseas to find employment. In a country in which free speech was a celebrated constitutional right, many Communist sympathizers, and many more who were unjustly accused, instantly lost their civil rights. In addition to the destruction of many notable careers, the damage left in the path of the investigation made for a less daring, less confrontational Hollywood. At the onset of the 1950s, the film industry was producing far fewer socially conscious pictures. Intimidated, Hollywood took no chances.
Along with Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, among those politicians who championed the cause of “protecting” America from the alleged Red scourge, were California congressman Richard M. Nixon, Nevada senator Patrick A. McCarran, and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1950, the McCarran Act was signed, mandating that all Communist-affiliated organizations register with the office of the United States attorney general. Anyone associated with these organizations was denied a passport and forbidden to work for the government. Practically overnight, America found itself in the throes of mass hysteria. By the time Joseph McCarthy entered the scene, the finger-pointing had reached its peak. Neighbors accused neighbors of being Communists; friends accused friends; even families were antagonistic toward their own. The question “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” had become an everyday part of the national discourse.
Ray Bradbury hoped that his choice for the presidency, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, would win the 1952 election and reverse the climate of fear that had consumed the country, but Stevenson lost the election by a sizable percentage. General Dwight D. Eisenhower garnered more than fifty-five percent of the vote to Stevenson’s forty-four.
“I was disappointed in Stevenson,” Ray remarked. “He had no courage. He didn’t speak out against McCarthy during the campaign and that’s why he lost. It was terrible. Nobody spoke up. Nobody.”
Days after the election, on November 7, 1952, Ray was invited to speak before the Los Angeles chapter of the National Women’s Committee of Brandeis University. Influenced by the recent election results, and the years of censorship and Communist witch hunts, Ray’s speech was a rallying cry extolling the virtues of free speech, the power of the written word, and the necessity of libraries courageous enough to house books encompassing all ideologies and all faiths from far left to far right. Titled “No Man Is an Island,” the speech was a rousing and moving manifesto; it was such a success that the National Women’s Committee printed it in booklet form, a twelve-page pamphlet given to members of another chapter within the organization.
“I was on a roll,” said Ray. Refusing to stop with one speech delivered to a private audience, he took his opposition to the current political climate a step further.
Incensed by Stevenson’s loss, disappointed by the candidate, and infuriated by the censorship that gripped the country, Ray paid for a full-page ad in Daily Variety, a widely read Hollywood trade magazine. On November 10, 1952, the publication ran Ray Bradbury’s highly charged missive:
Letter to the Republican Party
You have won and the Democrats are now the opposition. And so it is time for someone to remind you of a few words that you yourselves spoke during the campaign concerning fear of losing the two-party system.
I remind you now that the two-party system exists and will continue to exist for the next four years. Every attempt that you make to identify the Republican Party as the American Party, I will resist. Every attempt that you make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of Communism, as the “left-wing” or “subversive” party, I will attack with all my heart and soul.
I have seen too much fear in a country that has no right to be afraid. I have seen too many campaigns in California, as well as in other states, won on the issue of fear itself, and not on the facts. I do not want to hear any more of this claptrap and nonsense from you. I will not welcome it from McCarthy or McCarran, from Mr. Nixon, Donald Jackson, or a man named Sparkman. I do not want any more lies, any more prejudice, any more smears. I do not want intimations, hear-say, or rumor. I do not want unsigned letters or nameless telephone calls from either side, or from anyone.
I say this to you then: do your work and do it well. We will be watching you, we, the more than 25,000,000 Americans who voted without fear and who voted Democratic. We are not afraid of you and you will not int
imidate us. We will not be sloughed aside, put away, turned under, or “labeled.” We are a strong and free force in this country and we will continue to be the other half of that wonderful two-party system you wailed so much about losing.
Leave that system alone, then, leave our individual rights alone; protect our Constitution, find us a way to Peace, and we will be friends. But God help you if you lay a hand on any one of us again, or try to twist the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to your purposes. We Democrats intend to remain as powerful and thoughtful four years from now as we are today, and that is powerful and thoughtful indeed, and, given provocation, we will vote you out the door in ’56, with the majority next time, behind us.
Get to work now, remembering that you have good men in your party if you put them to work. But in the name of all that is right and good and fair, let us send McCarthy and his friends back to Salem and the 17th Century. And then let us all settle down to the job of moving ahead together, in our time, without fear, one of the other, and with the good of everyone, each lonely individual in our country, firmly held in mind.
Ray Bradbury
“I was sick and tired of all the terrible things being said back and forth, the Communist talk, the anti-Catholic talk, the anti-Jewish talk, that everybody was spouting,” Ray declared. “I had to say something.”
The day his letter was published, Ray was visiting the office of his Hollywood agents, Ben Benjamin and Ray Stark, when Benjamin emerged from his office clutching the issue of Daily Variety. He shook it at Ray Bradbury.
“You’ll never work in Hollywood again!” he shot at his young client.
“Yes, I will,” Ray responded, “because I’m not a Communist.”
Furious with Ray Bradbury, Benjamin was certain that Ray was calling undue attention to himself in a time when so many had decided to keep their mouths shut and heads down. And he was right. The U.S. government would investigate Ray, but not for several more years.