The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  “End of the friendship,” said Ray, reflecting back on the incident. “And I got him the job! Could you imagine? I was stabbed right in the heart.”

  Dan Kolsrud, Clayton’s assistant director and the associate producer of the film, had a different take on the dramatic events. While Kolsrud was not privy to the closed-door meeting between Ray and Clayton, he said that Clayton’s hiring of screenwriter John Mortimer was more a reflection of Jack Clayton’s insecurities than a statement on Ray Bradbury’s writing prowess.

  “Jack brought John Mortimer in on other films he did,” said Kolsrud. “Whether it was for credit or not, I don’t know.” It was Kolsrud’s opinion that Jack Clayton simply felt more assured with Mortimer adding a final, minor polish; it certainly wasn’t because Ray’s script was weak.

  “We’d all read Ray Bradbury and all loved his writing, so we sort of all sat at his feet,” added Kolsrud. “To everyone on the set, and it might have been different with Jack, but Ray Bradbury was this sort of old- world gentleman. He was extremely charming.”

  Something Wicked This Way Comes went into production at the Disney studios in Burbank, California. Casting included Jason Robards as Charles Halloway, the father in the novel, and Jonathan Pryce in the coveted role of Mr. Dark, the proprietor of the sinister carnival that descends upon a small, innocent midwestern town looking to make people’s dreams come true for a price.

  Although it was one of the great betrayals of his long and illustrious career, “I couldn’t stay away from the set, no matter what,” Ray said. After decades of trying to get the novel produced, Something Wicked was finally getting made. The entire experience had been tarnished, but Ray was still hopeful that, in the end, a good film would be made of his book. Sad and hurt, Ray’s spirits were lifted somewhat by the numerous beautiful and elaborate sets built for the film on the Disney back lot. Every day for two weeks, Ray visited the set and admired the detailed re-creation of Green Town—the houses, the town plaza, and, most of all, the old, dark library with its jungle-green reading lamps and tall stacks of books in which Mr. Dark and Charles Halloway face their moment of truth.

  “It was still my film,” said Ray. “It was my book. And here we had a case where a man who had double-crossed me was directing it. The whole time on the set, Jack wouldn’t talk to me.” Ray recalled how Clayton’s secretary explained the director’s silence: Jack Clayton was unhappy with Ray because he hadn’t supported the John Mortimer script. Clayton, the secretary explained, even felt that Ray should have written a letter of praise to Mortimer, complimenting his script.

  “Get me his address!” Ray said. “I’ll write a lying letter!” Ray simply wanted Clayton to talk to him. Indeed, Ray wrote John Mortimer, praising his fine screenplay for Something Wicked This Way Comes. After that, Jack Clayton resumed communications with Ray. “Throughout the entire ordeal, I kept warning Ron Miller, the head of the studio who was Walt Disney’s son-in-law. But he didn’t really know what to do. He didn’t have the touch,” said Ray.

  When production on the film had wrapped, and an early preview was arranged, Ray and Maggie and his four grown daughters all attended. As Ray expected, the film was terrible. In his estimation, everything about it was wrong—from the editing, to the ending, to the score. The preview audience was completely silent. A few days later, Ray’s telephone rang. It was Disney chief Ron Miller calling. He wanted Ray to come to his office right away. “I walked into his office,” Ray remembered, “and he said, ‘I hope you’re not going to say, “I told you so.” ’ I said, ‘I’m not. There’s no time for that. Rebuild the sets. Rehire the actors. I’ll rewrite the script. I’ll make a new ending. I’ll time the ending because the editing is all wrong. I’ll write a narration for the film. You need a new score.’” Because the project had been a fiasco, Ron Miller followed Ray’s advice. The actors were called back in and shooting resumed in an attempt to salvage the production. “Jack was there,” said Ray, “but he was mainly on the side. It was all a very strange situation.

  “In the end we spent five million dollars redoing everything that Jack Clayton did wrong. Unofficially, I became the director of the film. I tried to pretend that I wasn’t the director, but I was.”

  In April 1983, Something Wicked This Way Comes was released in the United States. It received mixed reviews. Prominent Chicago Tribune film critic and television personality Gene Siskel summed up the sentiments of many a national reviewer: “The beginning couldn’t be more promising; the climax couldn’t be more disappointing.”

  25. CATHODE RAY

  I think Ray’s style upsets the followers of life, while the leaders allow him to perpetuate new algorithms, new DNA, new forms of expression and new forms of omission. His art is to deconstruct, to move freely and embrace nuance and allegory and paradox through the tapestry of life, the distilling membrane of Ray Bradbury.

  —LARRY WILCOX, producer, The Ray Bradbury Theater

  “PEOPLE ASK, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Well, right here. All this is my Martian landscape. Somewhere in this room is an African veldt. Just beyond, perhaps, is a small Illinois town where I grew up. And I’m surrounded on every side by my magician’s toyshop. I’ll never starve here. I just look around, find what I need, and begin. I’m Ray Bradbury, and this is The Ray Bradbury Theater.”

  So began the opening sequence to each and every episode of Ray’s new cable television program, The Ray Bradbury Theater, which premiered on HBO on May 21, 1985.

  The idea for Ray’s television series began in 1984 when Larry Wilcox (perhaps best known as a California highway patrolman on the television series ChiPs) and his business partner, Mark Massari, began courting Ray. They imagined a series with episodes based on his short stories; Ray would be the host, introducing each program. Ray was flattered, but declined the offer. “I’d seen the way the studios treated Hitchcock,” he said. “When he needed extra money to reshoot some scenes, like we did on the episode I wrote, ‘The Life Work of Juan Diaz,’ the studio wouldn’t give it to him. At the time, I thought, If I ever have a series, I’m not going to be in a position where that happens to me, so help me God.”

  Offers did come Ray’s way. In the 1970s, NBC approached him about doing a television series. “Various others approached me over the years, including Universal,” he said, “and I turned them all down.”

  But Larry Wilcox and Mark Massari were Bradbury fans. They loved and respected Ray’s work. As “baby boomers,” they had grown up reading his books. “They took me out to lunch and to dinner and bought me wine and met Maggie and took us both out and they spent a year combing my hair and fixing my feathers until they convinced me they really meant it,” said Ray. “They would respect my rights and my tastes and I would control and write the whole thing. When they convinced me of that, I signed the contract.”

  It was an ideal situation. Ray would serve as sole writer and executive producer, and all the episodes would be based on his stories. Ray was given complete creative control. He would also host the program, à la Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling. The opening sequence for the episodes, showing Ray’s office—a sort of laboratory of the imagination, jammed from floor to ceiling with toy dinosaurs and rocket ships and books—was shot, in part, in Ray’s Beverly Hills office. Other shots, showing Ray arriving at his office in an old, hand-operated, wrought-iron elevator, were photographed in, ironically enough, the Bradbury Building at 304 South Broadway, in downtown Los Angeles. The name was purely coincidental. The Bradbury Building was constructed in the late 1800s and had a remarkable open lobby with a lacework of iron railings and stairs; it had been used as a location in many films over the years, and, in another coincidence, Forrest J Ackerman’s grandfather, George H. Wyman, designed it.

  The shoot of the opening sequence of The Ray Bradbury Theater took place at the Bradbury Building. Shortly before midnight Ray arrived on location. He had been, however, suffering from the flu and decided to go home. “When you see The Ray Bradbury Theater,” said Ray, �
��and the elevator comes up, supposedly I get off the elevator, but that isn’t me.” After Ray had left, producer Mark Massari was tapped as a body double for Ray, donning a sports jacket and slacks similar to what Ray might wear. With clever camera angles, Massari was a passable stand-in.

  The major networks all passed on The Ray Bradbury Theater, but the fledgling cable channel Home Box Office was interested. “HBO nibbled, as the marquee of Ray Bradbury helped market their fledgling brand,” recalled Wilcox. But HBO, newly launched, was unable to fund the entire series. Martin Leeds, an attorney for Wilcox Productions, sought out deficit spending and secured backing from the Canadian-based company Atlantis Films, a trend Wilcox referred to as “the beginning of the Canadian ‘drain’ on American production through Canadian government subsidy programs. This allowed Bradbury to be filmed under what are called the Treaty Deals with England, France, Canada, and New Zealand.”

  The first season of The Ray Bradbury Theater included six episodes, starring a wide range of Hollywood actors, including Drew Barrymore, William Shatner, Leslie Nielsen, Jeff Goldblum, and Peter O’Toole in the final episode of the season, “Banshee,” an autobiographical fantasy about Ray’s tumultuous tenure in Ireland working for John Huston. In the story, Ray finally exacted revenge on the film director for all of his wicked and manipulative games. Looking back on the series, this episode would stand as one of Ray’s favorites.

  “[W]e spent many late evenings,” wrote Ray in the introduction to 2003’s Bradbury Stories, “sitting by the fire, drinking Irish whiskey, which I did not much care for, but only drank because he loved it. And sometimes Huston would pause in the middle of drinking and talking and close his eyes to listen to the wind wailing outside the house. Then his eyes would snap open and he would point a finger at me and cry that the banshees were out in the Irish weather and maybe I should go outdoors and see if it was true and bring them in.

  “He did this so often to scare me that it lodged in my mind and when I got home to America I finally wrote a story in response to his antics.”

  “Banshee” was, as Ray liked to put it, “comeuppance time” for John Huston. In the story, Ray (renamed Douglas Rogers) goes into the dark Irish woods to encounter the lonely, wailing wraith. But it isn’t Douglas whom she desires. She wants Douglas to send the director (named John Hampton in the episode) out to her so she can have her way with him. This was vintage Bradbury, finding closure to real-life events through fiction. As Ray often advised aspiring writers: “Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. Make a list of ten things you hate and kill them.”

  After the first six episodes, The Ray Bradbury Theater moved to the USA Network. According to Wilcox, HBO, in its infancy, did not truly recognize the stature of the Ray Bradbury name, particularly in the international market, and they let the series go. It was an odd decision, likely based on production costs. During the first season on HBO, the series received six Cable Ace Award nominations—the top honors in cable television—and won three, including one award given to Ray for best writing on a dramatic series.

  The Ray Bradbury Theater stayed at USA for the remainder of its seven-year run, until 1992. In total, Ray wrote and served as executive producer on all sixty-five episodes, and the program was nominated for thirty-one Cable Ace Awards. It won twelve. But beyond attaining industry accolades, the television show introduced Ray to a whole new audience—the MTV generation. The Ray Bradbury Theater began just as MTV and cable television were exploding in popularity on the national landscape. For the first time, kids discovered Ray Bradbury not through reading, but on the television screen. And this caused many of them to rush out to libraries and bookstores to find his books.

  Ray was fully involved with his new television show, regularly visiting the sets on location where they were filmed in Canada, New Zealand, and France. But as ever, he wrote every day, and in October 1985, his first mystery novel was published by Knopf. It was an excursion into yet another genre by a man who had so often been labeled as “just a science fiction writer.”

  The only book of his own that Ray considered science fiction was Fahrenheit 451. If he was to be labeled at all, he much preferred another tag: “teller of tales.” And so, in 1985, the teller of tales made his first sojourn into the shadowy narrative labyrinth known as the detective novel. Ray had written mystery short stories before, selling them to the detective pulp magazines in the 1940s. But this was his first mystery novel, albeit very different from the standard detective yarn. In Death Is a Lonely Business, Ray abandoned many of the hard-boiled clichés of the genre and, instead, opted to write a highly nostalgic narrative about his days living in Venice, California, in the late 1940s. Absent was the steely voice so familiar to readers of mystery-noir. Instead, the story’s narrator was a thinly veiled young Ray Bradbury, a sentimental and sensitive science fiction and fantasy pulp writer living in Venice who is grappling with writing a novel. When the young author discovers a body trapped in an old circus lion’s cage that has been dumped in one of Venice’s dark, polluted canals, he becomes embroiled in a murder mystery. The novel nostalgically conjures many important places and incidents from Ray’s past as a struggling pulp writer. Death Is a Lonely Business was Ray’s first novel since Something Wicked This Way Comes, published twenty-three years earlier. And, along with Dandelion Wine, it is Ray Bradbury’s most autobiographical work of fiction.

  IN MAY 1988, as The Ray Bradbury Theater was clipping right along, Ray gathered still another short-story collection. This new one, titled The Toynbee Convector, included twenty-three stories, eight of which were older tales that had been unearthed in Ray’s files by his friends Bill Nolan and Donn Albright, an art professor at New York’s Pratt Institute who also functioned as Ray’s bibliographer. “The Tombstone” had first appeared in Weird Tales in March 1945 and in the now long-out-of-print Dark Carnival. “At Midnight in the Month of June” ran in the June 1954 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; The Toynbee Convector marked the first time the story had been collected in book form. Six more stories were culled from Ray’s voluminous files, all in various states of completion. These tales included “West of October,” which was originally titled “Trip to Cranamockett” and cut from Ray’s first book, Dark Carnival, prior to publication. Ray “ran a damp rag” over the old stories, editing and rewriting them for inclusion with fifteen new compositions in The Toynbee Convector.

  THROUGHOUT THE remaining seasons of The Ray Bradbury Theater, some of Hollywood’s finest actors appeared in a few of Ray’s short-story adaptations—Donald Pleasence in “Punishment Without Crime,” Robert Vaughn in “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl,” Hal Linden in “Mars Is Heaven,” James Whitmore in “The Toynbee Convector,” and Tyne Daly in “The Great Wide World Over There.” All the while, Ray Bradbury continued to turn out more books. Zen in the Art of Writing, a collection of essays on creativity and the writing process, was published in 1989. That year Ray’s essays on architecture, design, his past, and our future were collected in Yestermorrow. A Graveyard for Lunatics, a sequel to Death Is a Lonely Business, was published in July 1990. Ray wrote much of the book in Paris, late at night while Maggie slept, in their room at the Hôtel Normandie, where he and Maggie stayed every year. Ray never learned to use a computer, but he did own a small electric typewriter that had silent keystrokes.

  On the home front, Maggie was now working part time, tutoring students in technical French at the University of Southern California. Susan, Ray’s oldest daughter, had divorced and remarried, to Tommy Nixon, the road manager for the rock band the Eagles. Ramona was married to architect Andrew Handleman, while Bettina married graphic design artist and interior designer Gary Karapetian. Bettina and Gary had met on Halloween night in 1985 at Ray’s annual Halloween party, held at the Cheviot Hills house. It was always a gala affair, partygoers spilling out the front door and into the backyard as a raucous Dixieland jazz band played well into the night. A hired magician moved through the home, performing illusio
ns. But the annual Halloween party was never of interest to Maggie, who over the years had become more and more reclusive. Maggie never liked crowds. Though she reveled in one-on-one conversation, she avoided bawdy and clamorous events like the annual Bradbury Halloween party. She often retreated to the master bedroom during these costumed soirées, curling up with a cat and a good book.

  In May 1992, Ray published Green Shadows, White Whale, a book detailing his experiences working on the screenplay for Moby Dick in Ireland for John Huston. For years, people had suggested to Ray that he chronicle his Huston era, but he resisted. However, when he read Katharine Hepburn’s account of working for John Huston, The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, he decided it was time to do his own novel. While Katharine Hepburn’s book was entertaining, Ray felt it was too thin. And as he had done with The Illustrated Man and other works, Ray designed the cover of Green Shadows, White Whales, sketching a writer standing atop a slain whale, clutching a giant fountain pen in place of a harpoon, for jacket artist Edward Sorel.

  As the novel on his Ireland experiences was released, The Ray Bradbury Theater was winding down its successful run. But this hardly marked the end of Ray’s television success. That same year, almost twenty-five years after Ray had first envisioned it as a film, The Halloween Tree was made. David Kirschner, the president of Hanna-Barbera and creative force behind such cartoons as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo, purchased the rights to The Halloween Tree and hired Ray to freshen up the script he had peddled in Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The result: The Halloween Tree, an animated film narrated by Ray Bradbury and starring the voice of Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy as “Moundshroud.” A rousing success, it won the Emmy Award for “Best Animated Children’s Program” of 1992. Beginning with The Ray Bradbury Theater and ending with the highest award given in the television industry, for The Halloween Tree, Ray Bradbury had moved effortlessly into the realm of television. And to think—all from a man who had issued a stern warning of the dangers of television, in his short story “The Veldt” and his novel Fahrenheit 451.