Seasons Greetings!
It's time for a new episode of my Bradbury 100 podcast. This time I explore some of the best movies never made, by looking at Ray Bradbury's multiple unfilmed screenplays for The Martian Chronicles.
The book came out in 1950, and The Martian Chronicles immediately became a mini sensation that same year, thanks to the radio drama series Dimension X, which dramatised several stories from the book. Ray knew that there was dramatic potential in his Martian tales, and the late 1950s saw him - by now an established screenwriter, thanks to Moby Dick and It Came From Outer Space - drawing up plans for a TV series to be called Report From Space.
Alas, the series didn't make it to air, and his attempts to develop The Martian Chronicles further for the big screen also came to nothing. But the scripts are pretty good, and allow us to play a game of what if:
- What if Ray Bradbury's TV series came on air the same year as The Twilight Zone or Men Into Space?
- What if the producer-director/actor team from 1962's To Kill A Mockingbird had succeeded in making The Martian Chronicles before 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Star Trek) had come along?
To find out more... listen to the episode...!