New Short Film - All Summer in a Day

All Summer in a Day is a short film production funded via Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website. It's based on the Ray Bradbury short story, which has been filmed once before. The Kickstarter target was a modest $5000 or so, which was reached in April.

You can read more about the production here, and here is the trailer/pitch:

After the rain, the sun!

Bradbury's well known story "All Summer in a Day", in which the sun only appears for a very short time (just like a typical British summer), is the inspiration for a full-length dance by the Red Bucket Dance Company. If I have read the story correctly, this group is based in Sacramento, California. More information, including dates and times of performances are in this story from Newsreview.com.

Meanwhile, in West Hollywood poets are performing Bradbury at an event which is part of the Big Read programme. Details are here.

Elsewhere (I don't know exactly where, because the web page gives absolutely no details!) somebody is rehearsing Bradbury's play Kaleidoscope, based on his short story of the same name. How do I know this? Because there are thirty-six photos here!

[Update: I have now realised that those Kaleidscope photos have captions! The first one tells us the following: Actors run a dress rehearsal of "Kaleidoscope", an adaptation of two Ray Bradbury radio plays, Wednesday night in Lafayette. The show will run April 26-29 and May 3-6 at 7 p.m. each night at Theatre 810 in downtown Lafayette. By Leslie Westbrook April 18, 2012.  I don't know where Lafayette is, but I'm guessing California.]

Odds and Ends

The blog Modern Mechanix has reproduced a rare Bradbury appearance: his poem "Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns", as it appeared in the magazine Interface Age in 1978. The poem's first appearance was in Bradbury's book of the same title (Knopf hardcover, 1977).

Some things you see on these interwebs are just too bizarre for words. Maybe this is why links were invented. See what you make of this!

Le Monstre...

I was amused to discover that The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was dubbed Le Monstre des Temps Perdus for French-speaking markets - this translates back into English as "the monster of lost times", unless I am very much mistaken. Presumably the fact that the critter was from the deepest depths wasn't enough for the French, so they empasised the depth of time instead. I discovered this thanks to this blog post from Hal Astell, which gives a neat review of the Bradbury-inspired, Harryhausen-animated movie which started the monster flick trend of the 1950s. My own page on the film, giving Bradbury's account of his involvement, is here.

Another Bradbury media review, this time of "The Screaming Woman" - one of the earliest Ray Bradbury Theatre episodes - can be found on Examiner.com. My own review of that episode can be found here.

Finally, for filing under the heading of "the mind boggles" comes this production, shortly to open in New York:

Opera on Tap will present Operamission's production of the one-act opera Margot Alone in the Light, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story All Summer in a Day by composer Clint Borzoni and librettist Emily Conbere. Margot Alone in the Light was originally conceived during Borzoni and Conbere's participation as Resident Artists in American Lyric Theater's Composer Librettist Development Program. Ray Bradbury's story is set in a classroom of schoolchildren on the planet Venus, where it rains constantly with the exception of one hour every seven years. None of the schoolchildren remember the sun, except for 'Margot,' who moved to Venus four years ago from Ohio. The role of 'Margot' will be portrayed by soprano Martha Guth and the role of 'Mrs. Clott,' the schoolteacher, will be sung by mezzo-soprano Alteouise de Vaughn. It will be staged by Scott C. Embler (founding member and former producing director of Vital Theatre Company). Jennifer Peterson, founder and director of operamission, will conduct the opera.

More details can be found at Broadway World.

All Summer in a Day

One of the most asked-about Bradbury stories is "All Summer in a Day". Barely a day goes by without someone posting to the Bradbury message boards enquiring about their vague memory of a short film they were once shown at school.

I was quite amused to discover this web page from the Chicago Tribune about "seasonal affective disorder," which refers to Bradbury's story. The page also has a direct link to the full text of the story.

As for the film, it occasionally appears on YouTube and elsewhere, no doubt without permission of the copyright holders. Its latest appearance is here.

In case you were wondering, the image on the left is the cover of the March 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction which contained the first appearance of "All Summer in a Day".