Ray in the Archives

Perhaps more than any other writer, Ray Bradbury attracted documentary film-makers, journalists and reporters. His processes of writing and his attitudes to life were endlessly fascinating, and we are fortunate that we have a partial record of his views and opinions captured on film at key stages of his career.

Here is one from 1969, made for Canadian television. It's from around the time that The Illustrated Man was being made - a Hollywood feature film starring Rod Steiger and Clare Bloom, and directed by Jack Smight. Bradbury had nothing to do with the making of the film, and would later be very critical of it. (I seem to recall that he accused the screenwriter of being a real estate agent. It sounds like an insult, but Bradbury's point was that the script wasn't written by a writer, but by a real estate agent who was playing at being a writer. Whether this is factually accurate I have no idea, but it's what Bradbury always said.)

Anyway, this is Bradbury at the age of 48 or 49, in the year that Apollo 11 landed on the moon. An author who has well and truly broken out of the genre ghetto he started in. An author whose works are now famous enough to be made into major movies. An author who, for nearly a decade, has been a spokesman for "science fiction" and a commentator on the space race. Enjoy:

Ray Bradbury, Illustrated - from CBC