by Sam Weller
Ray recalled one scene at the NASA vehicle assembly building that required twenty takes. “I flubbed it each time. By the time we were on the twenty-first take, I was in tears because I felt so stupid.” A crew member consoled Ray, telling him that everything would be okay if he’d just relax. But standing before the camera, reading a prepared script, was too deliberate for Ray. It smacked of inauthenticity and went against his credo of trusting the subconscious. Ray felt stiff on camera.
At the Cape, Ray was brought to the old launch pads from which the Apollo rockets had blasted off to the moon. “The launch sites were abandoned,” Ray remembered with sadness. “The very spot where the rockets lifted off. Abandoned in place. In other words, we had given up on the moon.” Ray was so moved by the desolation of the historic sites, and the symbolism of our abandoned hopes and aspirations, that he wrote three poems right there, on the spot where humankind had only a decade earlier reached for the cosmos.
Ray felt beleaguered by the entire experience of working on Infinite Horizons. And at that time, his personal life was in disarray: His second mistress phoned him while he was working on the television special to tell him she wanted to end the affair. She had joined the Catholic Church and could no longer continue the affair in good conscience. Ray was devastated. But he didn’t try to woo her back, for he felt it was noble that she had found religion.
OVER THE years, many attempts had been made to bring The Martian Chronicles to the screen. Director Fritz Lang had expressed interest; John Huston had once stated in no uncertain terms that he wanted to turn the science fiction classic into a motion picture, although ultimately Huston decided against it, following his experiences with Ray on Moby Dick. In 1953, writer Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe approached Ray about making a musical-theater version of The Martian Chronicles. “They wined me and dined me and danced me,” said Ray, “and took me out to fancy restaurants, and I finally said, ‘No, I don’t think it would make a good stage musical.’ They left and nothing ever happened to them except My Fair Lady and Camelot!” For several months in 1957, Ray had met regularly with producer David Susskind, who also wanted to make a musical of The Martian Chronicles. Susskind envisioned a musical comedy; Ray’s interest was piqued this time. But he told Susskind he wanted something darker, more operatic, in the tradition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. In the end, the two men were unable to see eye to eye and parted company.
Finally, in 1980, The Martian Chronicles was brought to television. The much-anticipated NBC miniseries adaptation of The Martian Chronicles aired in three consecutive nightly installments on January 27, 28, and 29. The television movie featured an ensemble cast, including actors Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowall, and Darren McGavin. Richard Matheson, the noted science fiction and fantasy author, screenwriter, and contributor to the original Twilight Zone television series, wrote the script for the miniseries. As was the case with so many of his media adaptations, Ray had nothing to do with its production.
The first time Ray saw the miniseries was at a preview the year before at the NBC studio in Burbank. Afterward, a press conference was held to promote several of the network’s upcoming programs and specials. Ray sat next to boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who was also there to promote a program. When a reporter asked Ray what he thought of The Martian Chronicles miniseries, Ray summed up his reaction in one word, delivered with his typical to-hell-with-it honesty: “Boring.” Later, at a cocktail reception, the head of NBC, Fred Silverman, approached Ray and asked him if what he said about the miniseries was true.
“Haven’t you seen it?” Ray asked the network chief.
Silverman admitted he hadn’t.
“Well,” Ray continued, “you better see it because you’ve got a boring miniseries on your hands.” Ray had even told friends that his “idea of hell” was sitting through NBC’s The Martian Chronicles. As a result of Ray’s words, the network reconsidered the three-part series. “They shelved it for a few months,” Ray said. “They tinkered with it a little bit, but not much.” When the program finally aired, Ray and several friends and family members gathered at his house to watch it. Again his assessment of it was, “It was just boring.”
Two years later, in January 1982, NBC got it right. The network had hired Ray to write a teleplay for the series NBC Peacock Theater. The story the producers selected to adapt was “I Sing the Body Electric!” from the book of the same name. It was a story Ray had brought to the screen before, with results he didn’t care for, in a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone. This time, Ray was overjoyed with the adaptation of his script. The episode was given the more television-friendly title “The Electric Grandmother,” and it starred Maureen Stapleton as a robotic grandmother called into service to assist a family who is grieving the death of their mother. It was a tender story that belied the widespread impression that Ray Bradbury only wrote antitechnology tales. “It was a beautiful adaptation,” Ray said. “It was very touching.” Later that year “The Electric Grandmother” was nominated for an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Children’s Production.”
In October 1982, Ray traveled to Orlando, Florida, for the opening of EPCOT Center. He took the train, of course. From the start, his voyage was a traveler’s nightmare. Ray first stopped in New Orleans to give a lecture at a local college. While there, he learned that he couldn’t get continuing rail service to Orlando, and so he hired a limousine driver to take him on the five-hundred-mile trek. The driver was a courtly southern African-American gentleman in his midseventies with whom Ray enjoyed talking as they headed across swamp and ’gator country toward the city that Disney had built.
Somewhere outside of Tallahassee, Florida, the limousine blew a tire. “We’re out on the highway,” said Ray, “repairing a ruptured tire, with cars going by us at eighty miles an hour. Of course, the spare was no good, and could just barely run on a rim of rubber.” So Ray and the driver went to buy a new spare. “It took us two hours to find one going all around Tallahassee,” Ray recalled. “All the while, God was whispering to me, ‘Fly, dummy! Fly!’”
A hundred and fifty miles farther down the Florida interstate, the limousine engine blew. “The limousine was going to hell!” Ray said. The old car drifted off the highway, coasting slower and slower, finally lurching into the parking lot of a Howard Johnson motor lodge. Ray and the old driver both got rooms and called it a day. The next morning, Ray called a taxi company to take him the remaining distance to Orlando. “Smokey and the Bandit showed up,” said Ray, referencing the 1977 film starring Burt Reynolds and Jackie Gleason. When the taxi rolled up, Ray noted that the driver was a dead ringer for Gleason. To top it all off, Ray learned that the driver was the town sheriff, who moonlighted as the town cabbie. The sheriff-cabbie drove Ray the remaining distance to Orlando, pontificating the entire way, acting as tour director, pointing out various Sunshine State sights. “The taxi trip must have cost me two hundred dollars,” said Ray. “But it was a great trip because he was a great guy.”
Ray’s twenty-seven-year-old daughter Bettina joined her father for the grand opening of EPCOT, a three-day, multimillion-dollar extravaganza. Unlike her father, however, Bettina flew from Los Angeles to Florida for the gala event. One evening, as father and daughter were strolling through the park’s World Showcase—a series of re-created international streets and buildings—it stormed. Ray recalled with awe that the EPCOT staff appeared almost instantaneously with complimentary umbrellas for the thousands of guests. “We marched down the streets of Paris and Rome like a parade of parapluies,” remembered Bettina.
While at the opening of EPCOT, Ray appeared as a guest on the Larry King television show. He was interviewed from the lobby of the Contemporary Hotel as a large crowd of bystanders assembled. Bettina looked on with pride, thinking, “Two amazing visionaries who created amazing tomorrows by looking backward—Walt Disney and Ray Bradbury. If you only have two heroes in your life, you could do a lot worse.”
On the last night of their visit,
as fireworks exploded in the sky over EPCOT, Ray thought of the 1939 World’s Fair, when he had looked up at the sky with tears in his eyes, realizing that World War Two was inevitable. This time, at age sixty-two, Ray watched the fireworks with tears of joy in his eyes, thrilled to have helped Walt Disney’s vision of a never-ending world’s fair become a reality.
When the EPCOT celebration was over and it was time to go home, Ray’s travel woes worsened. There was still no direct rail service from Orlando to Los Angeles; he would have to travel through Washington, D.C., to get to California. “I went to the Disney people and told them that I had a little problem. I think God’s been whispering to me for two days now. ‘Fly, dummy! Fly!’” It was time to confront and overcome his fear of flying; and so Ray made a monumental decision and asked the Disney people to book him on a flight.
To survive his first flight, Ray decided he needed to get liquored up. So, before boarding, he drank three double martinis and “they poured me on a Delta airliner,” said Ray. The occasion was important enough that Time magazine sent a photographer to snap the Martian Chronicler taking his first flight. In the photo, Ray, white-haired, in suit and tie, is gritting his teeth and gripping his armrests.
“I took my first flight and I didn’t panic,” he confessed. “I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of flying, I was afraid of me. I was afraid that I would run up and down the aisles screaming for them to stop the plane.” When that didn’t happen, Ray’s fear of flying abated and he began flying regularly from then on. In fact, he and Maggie began making annual trips to their beloved second home, Paris, on the Concorde. And he was able to accept more and distant lecture invitations.
ONE OF Ray’s long-held dreams was to see Something Wicked This Way Comes adapted for the big screen. In 1982, Disney purchased the film rights to the book. This was just the latest chapter in a long saga—the tortuous trip from page to screen.
It began in 1950. A knock came at the door of Ray and Maggie’s tiny apartment. Thirty-year-old Ray opened the door to find an even younger man, a USC film student, calling. The young man’s name was Sam Peckinpah, and he was an aspiring director. He was also a huge Ray Bradbury fan, and had come by simply to meet Ray. The two chatted briefly, both unaware that their career paths would cross two decades later.
In 1955, Ray wrote a screenplay of Something Wicked This Way Comes for Gene Kelly, but that project was shelved when no backing could be found. Then, in 1971, Peckinpah, now a renowned director (most notably for his paean to the waning days of the American West, 1969’s The Wild Bunch), approached Ray again, this time about adapting Something Wicked This Way Comes. While Ray felt that the director’s work was strikingly violent, he was convinced of his talent and was enthusiastic about the idea of working with Peckinpah.
“I asked Sam,” recalled Ray, “‘How would you make the film?’”
“Take the book and shove the pages into the camera,” Peckinpah replied. And that was all Ray Bradbury needed to hear.
“If you look at the average page of any of my novels or short stories,” said Ray, “it’s a shooting script. You can shoot the paragraphs—the close-ups, the long shots, what have you. This has to do with my background and seeing films and collecting comic strips, because Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan—those are all storyboards for films, aren’t they?”
Ray and Peckinpah had several meetings about the project as Peckinpah sought financial backing for the picture. The director, as Ray recalled, was a heavy drinker, and when he was drunk he was lovable and charming. At their meetings, usually happy-hour gatherings during which Peckinpah would pour gin in Ray’s beer to keep him on equally inebriated footing, the two men had a grand time. But Peckinpah took months seeking funding, which he ultimately never found. Because it was taking so long, Ray believed that Peckinpah was “dragging his feet,” and that the director was not truly committed to the project. As a gesture of his confidence and desire to work with Peckinpah, Ray offered to sell him the option rights to the novel for one dollar. But Peckinpah wouldn’t take it.
Finally, in 1977, Ray turned to Paramount, selling the studio the rights to Something Wicked This Way Comes. Ray would be writing the script.
That week, as word about the sale of the novel made the rounds, a delivery arrived at the front door of the Bradburys’ Cheviot Hills home: a small, spiky cactus and a jar of Vaseline. Attached was a note from Sam Peckinpah. Ray recalled the message: “It said, ‘Cut this cactus in three parts—one for you, one for your director, and one for your producer. And use the Vaseline as directed.’” Ray was bewildered; he believed that Peckinpah had been afforded more than enough time to secure financial backing for a production. “When he had a few drinks in him,” said Ray, “Sam loved me. Then, when he was sober, he wasn’t interested.” But the cactus amused Ray, so he placed it on the front porch until Maggie finally threw it out a year later.
The saga of Something Wicked This Way Comes didn’t end with the sale of the novel rights to Paramount. Jack Clayton was the producer on the project. Ray had known Clayton since working with him on Moby Dick from 1953 to 1954, when Clayton had served as associate producer on the film (he had also served in this capacity on the 1952 Huston film, Moulin Rouge, as well as on Huston’s 1953 picture, Beat the Devil). Despite the turmoil between Ray and Huston throughout the making of Moby Dick, Ray had always liked and admired Jack Clayton. Since then, Clayton had become a respected director in his own right, with the 1974 adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford in the title role. The film was a favorite of Ray’s and Maggie’s. “It was a beautiful film,” raved Maggie. “We saw it several times over the years on television.”
In 1977, Ray began writing a new screenplay for Paramount Pictures. “The first script I handed in to Jack was 220 pages,” said Ray—one hundred pages longer than the average two-hour film screenplay. “He made me cut it and cut it and cut it,” said Ray. Initially, Ray cut the screenplay to 170 pages. Clayton then asked him to edit it to 150 pages. Ray went back to the typewriter and trimmed the script. Then Clayton told him that he had to get down to 120 pages. “‘I can’t cut anymore,’ I told him,” recalled Ray. Nonetheless, in the end, Ray did it. “We had a nice script of 120 pages. Perfect. And it was perfect because Jack was patient with me. He was a very bright guy.” But when Clayton delivered the screenplay to the two top decision makers at the studio, president Michael Eisner and chairman Barry Diller, there was an argument. “One liked it, and the other didn’t,” said Ray. “I never found out which one didn’t like the screenplay.” The differing opinions between the studio executives led to an impasse, and according to Ray, they argued about it for weeks. “Jack and I finally picked up our baggage and left. The whole project fell through.”
The film rights reverted back to Ray, and years passed without any studio interest in Something Wicked This Way Comes until in 1982, when Disney purchased the film rights. At long last, it appeared as if this wonderfully cinematic novel would finally make it to the big screen. When the powers at Disney asked Ray if he had a director in mind, Ray was quick to recommend his friend Jack Clayton. After all, they had worked hard on the project while at Paramount, and Ray trusted that Clayton understood what it took to make a good adaptation of a Ray Bradbury book. “The secret is no secret at all,” Ray exclaimed. “Follow the book! It’s what Sam Peckinpah said. Stuff the book in the camera and shoot the damned thing!” However, when Ray suggested Clayton to the Disney people, according to Ray, they were less than enthusiastic. Clayton was an old-fashioned director and the Disney people, in this new era of the big-budget special-effects film, wanted more of a young gun who could draw a younger audience. Ray asked if they had seen any of Clayton’s films, The Bespoke Overcoat, or Room at the Top, or The Great Gatsby. “I told them,” said Ray, “‘It’s very simple, if you don’t use him, I won’t sell you the script.’” Faced with Ray’s ultimatum, the studio acquiesced. Jack Clayton was hired to direct Something Wicked This W
ay Comes.
Ray would soon realize that he had made a big mistake. In 1983, the day before filming began, Ray met with Clayton. “I sat across the table from him,” Ray recalled, “and he handed me the script.”
“Jack said, ‘We’ve got a new script for the film.’” Ray was incredulous. He had written the screenplay based on his novel, a screenplay that he had meticulously honed according to Clayton’s detailed instructions in 1977. Who had written a new screenplay? Why had someone written a new screenplay? Ray didn’t understand. Jack Clayton explained. He had hired John Mortimer, the English screenwriter who had recently written the script for the television miniseries Brideshead Revisited, to rewrite Ray’s script. “We knew you were busy,” Ray recalled Clayton saying.
“Busy, hell!” Ray blurted out. “All you had to do was ask me and I would have revised the script if I agreed with the changes.”
Jack Clayton told Ray to take the screenplay home and read it. He told him to report back if he found things in the script that he disagreed with. The screenplay, according to Ray, no longer even had his name on it. It now belonged to Mortimer. “He was a fine writer,” said Ray, “but he didn’t know fantasy.”
“The next day,” Ray recalled, “old naïve Ray comes in with a list of twelve things in the first twenty pages of the script that didn’t work.” Clayton took a few moments to review Ray’s list, and then “he tossed the notes back at me across the desk,” recalled Ray, “and said, ‘Completely unacceptable.’”