Written By Summer 2010 : Page 33
Norman Corwin, left, and Ray Bradbury arship afloat—an authorized biogra- pher in Sam Weller; an unauthorized biography, titled Uncensored!; bibli- ographers; even a scholarly institute called The Bradbury Center—that have for years been dedicated to sort- ing through these files and rescuing neglected gems. Recently, the 1954 screenplay of the film directed by John Huston, Moby Dick, has been collated and distilled from Brad- bury’s many solo drafts and pub- lished in 2008 [edited by William F. Touponce with Jonathan R. Eller]. Of the 65 stories that became The Ray Bradbury Theater (a Ca- nadian-filmed TV series from the mid-1980s, entirely written by Brad- bury), one of the funniest and most fascinating is The Banshee, which stars Peter O’Toole as a grandly ma- cho movie director whose initials are “JH,” and who cheerfully toys with a relatively naïve young writer named “Doug.” (Bradbury’s alter-ego in Dandelion Wine is named Doug, played here by Charles Martin Smith.) JH greets Doug at the door of his remote Irish castle and, like a warm-blooded Dracula, invites him inside with an eye to draining not his blood but his brainpower. “Master- piece,” he growls, as he speed-reads the screenplay Doug has just handed him, rapidly dropping each of its hundred and more pages on the floor one-by-one as he reads, muttering: “Genius: Genius!” This was exactly how Huston dealt with Bradbury, and The Ban- shee (a droll fantasy in which an ag- grieved female spirit runs howling in woods behind JH’s castle) must have gotten the juices flowing, because a year or two later Bradbury realized he was going to have to make a full- length book of his Moby Dick adven- ture—Green Shadows, White Whale (Knopf, 1992). The portrait of Huston there is electric with life: Bradbury entered their relationship as a hero-worship- per but left as a bruised adversary. “You know anything about hyp- MeNtoredByray ture, but for a number of adherent writ- ers the 89-year-old author’s name also signifies mentor. “He was like Zeus to them,” says Marc Scott Zicree, a current apprentice of Bradbury’s and author of The Twilight Zone Companion. Bradbury’s personal influence on writ- r ers and the sci-fi genre spans decades and includes not only literature but film and television as well, including Rod Ser- ling’s landmark series The Twilight Zone. Serling’s core group of writers, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, were both schooled by Bradbury, and it was Bradbury who recommended the pair to Serling when he was about to launch his anthology show. In the new documentary, Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, Bradbury recounts how in 1946 he met a 16-year-old nov- ice artist named Chuck Beaumont at a bookstore in downtown L.A. A few years later, their paths crossed again. Bradbury was at Universal Studios working on the film It Came From Outer Space when he discovered that Beaumont was also work- ing on the lot in the music department. At that time, Beaumont told Brad- bury that he was on the verge of chang- ing his life and wanted to become a writer. “I’ll tell you what,” said Bradbury, “you come to my house, and you scratch and scream like a dog and bark a couple of times, and if I look out and see that you have a manuscript held in your teeth and you’re begging for attention, I’ll let you come in.” When Beaumont did come around, ay Bradbury’s name is synonymous with great sci-fi and fantasy litera- Bradbury offered advice: “I told him that if you do a story a week for a year you can’t go wrong. You will begin to write quality.” Beaumont and Bradbury’s stu- dent/teacher relationship continued and morphed into a close friendship. Eventu- ally, Bradbury took some of Beaumont’s flock of writer pals under his wing as well, including William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, who each en- joyed successful careers in television and film and also collaborated on the sci-fi novel Logan’s Run. Before succumbing to a mysterious illness at age 37, Charles Beaumont went on to become a prolific and highly lauded writer of short stories, novels, television, and film in addition to penning 22 classic Twilight Zone epi- sodes. Bradbury’s benevolence to fledgling sci-fi writers, at a time when he was striving to maintain a substantial place for himself in the marketplace, might seem like an anomaly considering the competitive nature of the business. But Bradbury’s own roots are grounded in the tradition of writers mentoring each other. As a young writer, he was men- tored by the influential pulp sci-fi pio- neer Edmond Hamilton, his screenwriter wife Leigh Brackett (The Empire Strikes Back), and legendary writer-producer Norman Corwin. “Ray is so generous, gracious and lov- ing,” says Zicree. “He’s competitive, but he’s not looking to cut off people at the knees. He roots for other writers. The fact that he’s 89 and he’s still willing to put in the time and effort to work with and pro- mote younger writers is amazing.” —pat sierchio S U M M E R 2 0 1 0 W G AW W r i t t e n B y • 33
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