The One That Got Away

It's common knowledge (or received wisdom) that for every film that gets made, the are 5000 screenplays that get left on a shelf; some because they are awful, but a goodly proportion for no particular reason other than being the wrong script at the wrong time.

Even a writer with an established reputation - Ray Bradbury, to pick an example at random! - can suffer this same fate. Although Bradbury has more than a handful of credits on completed feature films (Moby Dick, Something Wicked This Way Comes to name but two), he has his name on a large number of unfilmed scripts. Some of these have begun to appear in print in limited edition volumes from Gauntlet and Subterranean.

I have recently been studying Bradbury's unfilmed screenplays for The Martian Chronicles. Two of these have been published in the so-called The Martian Chronicles: the Complete Edition - these are a script from c.1965 which was written for Alan J. Pakula and Robert Mulligan, and a script from 1997 which was written for Paramount. The Complete Edition won't give you any of these details. Nor will it tell you that Bradbury wrote at least two other script version of The Martian Chronicles. Far from being "complete", that volume gives merely an (unexplained) glimpse at a substantial amount of script work Bradbury carried out between approximately 1958 and 1997.

I will be presenting a paper on these unpublished and unfilmed screenplays at a conference in a couple of weeks. The conference theme is the "invisible" nature of the screenplay, and my paper is titled "I Live By The Invisible: the Published and Unpublished Screenplays of Ray Bradbury". You can find my abstract on the conference website.

In case you are thinking a script is a script is a script, I can report that Bradbury seems to treat The Martian Chronicles differently each time he adapts it. Sometimes this may be because of the medium and format - a TV mini series will offer different opportunities than a two-hour feature film - and sometimes because of external factors. And in case you are still thinking a script is a script is a script, take a look at this delightful article on how strange (and terrible) some great movies could have been, if early drafts of the script had been used.

Collectibles

Like Fahrenheit 451's book-people, I value the content of a book more highly than its physical presentation. But even I was stopped in my tracks by this first edition of Dark Carnival being auctioned on eBay. The price tag of $3500 soon persuaded me to keep moving, nothing to see here...

If you are interested in collecting Bradbury collectibles, you should read the interesting little page on Abebooks. I don't have any of those really exotic editions, but I do have a few of the Gauntlet and Subterranean limited editions. I bought them to read, however; not as an investment!

Browsing Books

I found time to add to the main part of my site - I now have a page for We'll Always Have Paris, Bradbury's latest collection of new short stories. And thanks to HarperCollins, I can now offer a "browse inside" facility for this and some other books on my own site. Take a look below.

I also have a page for Masks, Gauntlet Press's latest effort in what can best described as Bradburyan archaeology. It's what they do best, in my view: digging into Bradbury's filing cabinets for abandoned works, finding the off-cuts and discards, and then attempting to make some sort of sense out of them. Of course, it's really the doing of Bradbury's master bibliographer Donn Albright, all watched by the scholarly eye of Eller and Touponce.

And now, have a good browse:

Slow Down, Mr B!

I never thought it would happen, but Ray Bradbury, nearly twice my age, is moving too fast for me to keep up with. I have two of his recent books in my "to read" pile, and he already has another two out. And another two scheduled for release. Not to mention the three stage plays already stacking up in California...

The two books already out - and not yet showing up elsewhere on my website - are Masks and We'll Always Have Paris.

Masks is an unfinished novel, originally written in the 1950s. It would have been Bradbury's second novel, after The Martian Chronicles. Gauntlet Press have now released the text for the first time, restored from various drafts and fragments located by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright. From this description, you may gather that this isn't an ideal book for the newcomer to Bradbury; instead, it's more suited to the Bradbury completist, the reader who likes to see how Bradbury does it. The volume also contains a handful of previously unpublished short stories.

Ordering information for Masks is to be found on Gauntlet's site, here. If you are in the UK, you can save on shipping by buying from The Book Depository - they offer free delivery.

More suitable for the general reader is Bradbury's latest short story collection from Wm Morrow. We'll Always Have Paris is titled to reflect Bradbury's love affair with the French capital, a love he developed when consulting for Disney on Disneyland Paris. The French, of course, last year reciprocated the affection by awarding Bradbury the honour of Commander of Arts and Letters. Bradbury wears his medal to almost every public event he attends.











On stage, Bradbury is flourishing at present. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit recently had a successful, if short, revival. According to the LA Times, the play "wears well". Read their review here.

Replacing Suit at the Fremont Centre Theatre, Pasadena, is Tobias Anderson in The Illustrated Bradbury. This is a one-man show in which Anderson adopts the guise of the Illustrated Man and other Bradbury characters. Information about the play can be found here (click on the "pick a show" dropdown, and select "Ray Bradbury Presents").

Running in parallel with Anderson's show is Falling Upwards, Bradbury's play based on his Irish experiences. Bradbury claims this production is the best he has ever seen of any of his plays, and who would dare to disagree? Full details about this production (at the El Portal Theatre, North Hollywood) can be found at www.raybradburysfallingupward.com

Finally, the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts is nearly upon us. It's held in Florida every year, and is considered to be one of the leading academic events in the field. I'm pleased to have had a paper accepted, so I will be presenting "Ray Bradbury's Time Interventions", which looks at how Bradbury has made use of time in his fictions - time travel, youth vs age, encounters with the younger or older self, etc.

New Books

It always seems to be the height of summer when a clutch of Bradbury books appears over the horizon. I recently received my copy of Match to Flame, the latest in a series of books from Gauntlet press that reveal the complex history of Bradbury's fictions.

This one, edited by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright, shows how Fahrenheit 451 didn't spring from nowhere, but was the culmination of a line of thought which Bradbury had been following through a number of short fictions in the years prior to F451's publication. Match to Flame includes a contextual essay from Bill Touponce, an essay on the texts themselves from Jon Eller, and an amazing set of stories, some of which appear here for the first time. This volume is also the first opportunity to view what remains of the fragments of Bradbury's first attempt at novel-writing, the never- completed When Ignorant Armies Clash By Night.


Coming soon from Gauntlet is another piece of textual detective work from Donn Albright, Somewhere a Band is Playing. This includes Bradbury's novella, which he developed from a screen treatment he originally wrote for Katharine Hepburn. The Gauntlet book includes pages from the screenplay and various fragments of Bradbury's developing story idea.

You can watch Bradbury tell his Katharine Hepburn anecdote on this YouTube page.

The Gauntlet titles are quite expensive, because they are limited editions. However, if you are lucky enough to live in a country where the dollar is relatively weak (the UK, for instance!), now is the time to get online and pick up these bargains. Match to Flame is already shipping - I received copy number 158 out of 750. Somewhere a Band is Playing is currently advertised for release in "Fall 2007".


If you have no interest in seeing how Bradbury got to his completed story, and just want to read it, you need Bradbury's latest book from his mass-market publisher, Wm Morrow. Now and Forever is an unusual book, being neither a novel nor a short story collection: it contains two novellas, "Somewhere a Band is Playing" and "Leviathan '99".

Both of these stories have been worked and re-worked by Bradbury many times over the years. Leviathan, in particular, has periodically made public appearances as a radio play, stage play and opera. Now, at last, the prose version is being made available. I assume that Bradbury was never able to expand the story to a sustainable novel length, and has settled on the novella as being the most appropriate form for the finished text.

Now and Forever is due for release on 4 September 2007. Here are direct links for pre-ordering:

Now and Forever at Amazon.com

Now and Forever at Amazon.co.uk

Editing Ray Bradbury

Ever wondered what's involved in establishing the definitive version of a text, when that text has passed through a series of editorial hands? Professor Jon Eller specialises in this field, and has made substantial contributions to Bradbury scholarship.

Jon's contribution to Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (co authored with Bill Touponce; Kent State University Press, 2004) was primarily in tracing the textual history of Bradbury's major works, revealing for the first time the extent of Bradbury's continual re-writing and re-development of his fiction.

Jon also edited the handsome Gauntlet Press edition of The Halloween Tree, which presented several variant texts of Bradbury's short novel alongside his award-winning teleplay version.

At the end of April, Gauntlet should be issuing Match to Flame. This volume, edited by Donn Albright, traces the roots of Fahrenheit 451. Jon has edited and annotated the texts presented in this volume.

Jon recently gave an account of his work editing Bradbury in a lecture at Indiana University. A video of the lecture (lasting just under an hour) is available here.