Moby Dick at Sixty-Five!

Sixty-five years ago today - 27th June 1956 - John Huston's film version of Moby Dick was released, with a screenplay co-written by Ray Bradbury. As regular readers of Bradburymedia will be aware, Ray's experience of working on this film cast a very long shadow.

Bradbury became somewhat obsessive over Herman Melville's story, and was driven to write his own prose version of Moby Dick in the form of Leviathan '99, which was initially a radio play, then a stage play and opera, and eventually a novella.

Bradbury's time in Ireland working on the script inspired him to write a number of Irish stories, initially as short plays and later as short stories. He later gathered up all of his Irish tales and laced them together with fictionalised recollections of his working with Huston, in the novel Green Shadows, White Whale.

Over the years, as I've researched the making of Moby Dick, I've blogged a number of times on different aspects of the film, so here's a selection of posts:

Bradbury's time in Ireland was really quite brief - less than a year - but he became very attached to the city of Dublin and its surroundings. Here's my attempt to follow in Bradbury's footsteps as I wandered around the Irish capital.

Bradbury left Ireland before the filming of Moby Dick began. As far as I know, he never saw any of the Irish locations used in the film. The small town of Youghal was one of the key locations, representing New Bedford in the film. In this post, I show how Youghal still shows distinct evidence of Moby Dick's presence.

Naturally, Moby Dick is full of symbolism of whales and fish. This simple post collects some of the key fishy moments from the film.

There has been some dispute over who exactly wrote what for the Moby Dick screenplay. Bradbury claimed to have written most of it, and fought against Huston's claim of half the screenplay credit. Rumours also circulate that Roald Dahl and others had a hand in the script (Dahl's own account says that he spent very little time on it, and didn't contribute a word). And Orson Welles - famed for re-writing any role he was asked to play - claimed to have written his own lines for the part of Father Mapple. In this post, I dig into Welles' lines and establish the truth of that particular claim.

Bradbury put a lot of detail into his script which Huston eventually removed or ignored. But in this post, I look at a detail which Huston kept, even modifying an existing building to accommodate it in the movie.

Finally, Ray Bradbury wasn't the only person to have a run-in with the larger-than-life Huston. In this post, I run through some of the other writers who fictionalised Huston or otherwise incorporated him into their recollections.

Bradbury (and others) versus John Huston

A well known part of Ray Bradbury lore is the time the author spent working on Moby Dick (1956) with Oscar-winning writer-director John Huston. Bradbury spent less than a year with Huston, yet that brief period had a lasting effect on the rest of Ray's life and career.

The screenplay credit on the film opened doors for him, enabling him to become a screenwriter who had freedom to choose which projects to devote his time to. The historical accident of Huston wanting to work in Ireland (where he had a home) led to Ray falling in love with Dublin and its people, some of whom would turn up as characters in the plays and stories he was inspired to write in the following decades. And the intense engagement with the text of Moby Dick itself led Bradbury to a fascination with the novel's mechanisms and symbolism, a fascination he had to work through for himself in his play, radio play, opera and novella Leviathan '99 - a space-age retelling of Herman Melville's book.

Eventually - about forty years after working with Huston - Bradbury felt compelled to pull together his recollections and his fantasies into a novel: Green Shadows, White Whale. The reader is left wondering how much of the novel to believe. On the one hand, it is a genuinely accurate reminiscence of some of his adventures with Huston, confirmed by third parties who were there at the time. But on the other, there are stories within - such as the ghostly "Banshee" - which can't be anything but the work of a master fantasy writer.

 

Bradbury isn't the only person who felt compelled to put their experiences with Huston on record...

Novelist Peter Viertel fictionalised his adventures in White Hunter, Black Heart, later filmed by Clint Eastwood. It can't be coincidence that the wording and rhythm of Bradbury's title Green Shadows, White Whale matches that of Viertel's.

 

 

Katharine Hepburn, who suffered through Huston's filming of The African Queen, wrote up her experiences in The Making of The African Queen. Bradbury reported that it was Hepburn's book which confirmed that there was a good story to tell of working with Huston.

 

 

But way back before anyone else was writing up accounts of time with Huston, there was Charles Hamblett. He was with Huston in the Canary Islands during the filming of some of the shipboard action of Moby Dick, and found the whole thing so bizarre that he had to write a humorous novel about the whole affair, The Crazy Kill.

 

 

Moby Dick (1956) on Blu-Ray

Somehow it passed me by, but back in July a Blu-Ray version of Moby Dick was released - in Australia.

It's officially labelled as "region B", but there are many reports that the disc is actually region-free, which means it should play on any Blu-Ray player, anywhere in the world.

The few brief reviews I have seen indicate that the disc is quite plain, with no special extras, and the transfer is nothing special. It appears that no particular restoration has taken place. However, the Blu-Ray does offer one distinct improvement over the previous commercial releases of the film: it is in the correct 1.66:1 aspect ratio. This means that, for the first time, home viewers can see the full film frame, and not have Oswald Morris' careful compositions wrecked by inconsiderate cropping to a 4:3 frame.

Ray Bradbury's favourite films (1993)

Ray Bradbury was in love with movies. He claimed to have vivid memories of the entire film of the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame - from seeing it in a cinema with his mother when he was three years old in 1923.

Later in life he took to writing scripts for television and film, and actively tried to get his books and stories to leading film-makers, in the hope of collaborating with them. Among those he would approach were David Lean, Carol Reed, Akira Kurosawa and Steven Spielberg.

As an active member of the screenwriter's guild, in the 1950s he was instrumental in establishing and running a film club for screenwriters, a venture he undertook because he was astonished by the number of Hollywood screenwriters who were not well versed in the latest film releases.

In 1993, the American Film Institute ran a season of films selected from Bradbury's list of favourites. In the brochure for the event, they posted the full list. Here's what the Ray Bradbury of 1993 considered to be his favourites, listed "in the order in which he first saw them".

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
• The Thief of Baghdad (1924)
• The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
• The Lost World (1925)
• The Black Pirate (1926)
• The Mummy (1932)
• The Skeleton Dance (1929, short animated film)
• King Kong (1933)
• The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936)
• The Old Mill (1937, short animated film)
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
  
• The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)
• The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
• Fantasia (1940)
  
• Pinocchio (1940)
• Rebecca (1940)
• Things to Come (1936)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
  
• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
  
• Sunset Boulevard (1950)
• The Third Man (1949)
  
• Some Like it Hot (1959)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
• Moby Dick (1956)
• Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
• Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

As you can see, the films of his formative years hold most of the places in this list of favourites. And Bradbury somewhat immodestly includes three films (the last three) that he had connections with: he wrote the screenplay for Moby Dick and Something Wicked This Way Comes; and both Something Wicked and Fahrenheit 451 were based on novels by Bradbury. His inclusion of the latter two films is significant, as by the mid-2000s he would speak openly of his feeling of being betrayed by Jack Clayton in the making of Something Wicked, and would accuse Francois Truffaut of "ruining" Fahrenheit 451. His inclusion of the two films is a reminder that, for some time, he had genuine affection for them.

The AFI brochure includes a few comments from Bradbury on his selections. Of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he is quoted as saying "it caused me to walk strangely for months." The brochure goes on to say that Bradbury "sat through a whole program of films three time just to see [The Skeleton Dance] again and again."

As for Things to Come, Bradbury is quoted as saying it "so stunned me that I staggered forth to attack my typewriter, fearful that the Future would never come if I didn't make it." And of The Third Man: "If I were teaching cinema, The Third Man would be the first film I would screen to show students exquisite writing, casting, directing, composing and editing."

Finally, of the mighty King Kong, the AFI quotes Bradbury as follows: "When Kong fell off the Empire State he landed on me. Crawling out from under his carcass I carried on a lifelong love affair with that fifty-foot ape."

Bradbury Doodles

Anyone who ever corresponded with Ray Bradbury, or had a book signed by him, will likely be familiar with the doodles he was fond of adding, such as the charming little Moby Dick fellow you see here.

Frank Palumbo and his students kept up a correspondence with Bradbury for a decade or more, and Frank kept not just Bradbury's letters, but the envelopes they came in. Thanks to Frank's generosity, I am able to share some of them with you here.

One or two items have been tidied up a little (by me), mostly to remove folds, creases and inkblots. (The whale above is one of my Photoshop efforts, but you can see the untouched Bradbury original below, with the original message.) The most common items in the Bradbury doodle repertoire are faces and animals. The humans sometimes look angry, sometimes perplexed, sometimes just grotesque. The animals are a bit more straightforward.

The last item is a simple Bradbury annotation of the Edgar Allan Poe postage stamps on the envelope, indicating Bradbury's idea of the familial relationship between the two authors.

Onward!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old Cork, New Bedford

The small Irish town of Youghal, County Cork, stood in for New Bedford in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick, written by Ray Bradbury and John Huston.

When I was looking at "widow's walks" recently, it occurred to me that the rather fake looking widow's walk in the film was probably a production designer's add-on to a real house. So I thought I would go looking for that house, courtesy of Google Street View.

And what do you know, the place hasn't changed much. The widow's walk is long gone - taken down the day after shooting I expect - but the building remains. It is still happily trading on Youghal's five minutes of movie fame: it is now the Moby Dick pub.

Here's the two glimpses of the widow's walk in the movie:

Notice the old movie trick of concealing the buildings as much as possible (with ships in this case) so as to save on the amount of dressing required on the facades. Notice, too, that the closer shot clearly shows timber cladding on the walls, making the building(s) seem appropriate for New Bedford.

Here, on the other hand, is the same building today (or when Google's camera car last went past).

There are some more photos of the Moby Dick , including signs mentioning both John Huston and Gregory Peck, on this Google Plus photos page belonging to Martin Zima.

A couple of years ago, a small film-making crew recreated some of the Youghal scenes from the film. You can read the story and view some photos here. For photos from the shoot of the original film, watch this excerpt from an RTE documentary on John Huston:

Apparently, when in Youghal, you should drop in to Moby Dick's for a pint of Murphy's...

As the Pequod finally gets underway, it leaves New Bedford behind. The last we see of the place is a lighthouse and the headland across the bay. Of course, it's Youghal lighthouse we see in the film...

... as we can see from this Google Streetview image, which is almost an exact match:

Something Fishy This Way Comes

One of the finest aspects of the 1956 film version of Moby Dick, written by Ray Bradbury and John Huston, is the art direction supervised by Ralph Brinton. The story holds off from showing Moby Dick until the final scenes, but imagery of the whale is ever-present throughout. Here are some of those fishy moments.

(And yes, I know a whale is not a fish. But try telling that to Jonah.)

Huston's main credits, backed by a painting of an upturned sperm whale. This is one of the few films to have spoilers in its title sequence...

Ishmael's first glimpse of a whale, in the painting in the Spouter Inn. "Can whales do that?" he asks. He will find out later.

Queequeg enjoys the pictures in a book, but cannot read. Ishmael helps him out.

Signing on as crew of the Pequod: beneath Ishmael's signature, Queequeg's sign of the whale.

The tiller of the Pequod, made from the jaw of a sperm whale.

Here there be whales: Ahab's intricate and detailed charts obsessively chronicling the movements of Moby Dick.

Thar she blows! The white whale finally appears, and swallows up Ahab's boat.

What a fluke: Moby Dick's final actions, after ramming the Pequod, creating a mighty whirlpool which will swallow up everyone and everything except Ishmael.

Where Does A Widow Walk?

In Ray Bradbury's screenplay for Moby Dick (1956), there are some elaborate camera "leaps" when the Pequod is setting sail. First mate Starbuck looks across the harbour, and then we take a series of jumps - just cuts really, but Bradbury describes them as "steps" - to get closer to Starbuck's wife.

First we see her as a figure standing on a "widow's walk". Then, closer, as a solitary figure dressed in black, her dress fluttering in the wind. Then, closer still, we are looking over her shoulder out to sea. In the far distance is Starbuck aboard the Pequod.

Then the camera reverses its series of steps, back to Starbuck's point-of-view.

The sequence helps to humanise Starbuck, which is part of Bradbury's grand plan for the screenplay. It serves to set him apart from the rest of the crew - whose wives, mothers and significant others hang around on the quayside. And it acts as an ill omen: she's dressed funereally,and stands on a widow's walk.

Director John Huston found no use for this sequence, and so in the finished film we just get a shot of Starbuck looking up and off, a cut to a distant shot of his wife and family, and then a cut back to Starbuck.

In fact, the shot is so brief - and the figures quite indistinct when viewed on DVD, and the shot slightly cluttered by the mast and rigging in the foreground - that I have never really registered what we are looking at.

It's only when reading Bradbury's screenplay that I realised that the strange fenced-off area we see sitting on top of that distant roof is a "widow's walk".  Apparently, they are a common feature of coastal architecture in North America, although the idea that they are primarily for looking out to sea maybe a myth: as John Ciardi reported on NPR in 2006, they were usually constructed around chimneys, and were more likely used to help put out chimney fires.

The widow's walk shown in Moby Dick doesn't seem to be built around a chimney, unless it's a tiny chimney. It looks as if it was added to a building specifically to give Mrs Starbuck and kids somewhere to stand while they wave daddy Starbuck off.

Even without using Bradbury's conception for this scene, Huston still managed to get a sense of foreboding and dread, by making the other wives look as miserable as sin:

Bradbury in Ireland

In 1953, Ray Bradbury went to Ireland to write the screenplay for Moby Dick. John Huston was living there - reportedly because he was fond of Irish fox hunting.

While Bradbury and family holed up in central Dublin's Royal Hibernian Hotel (demolished in 1991), Huston was living it up in a lordly mansion which he was renting. Courtown Demesne was built in 1815, replacing a previous property which was destroyed. According to this report in the Irish Times, it's a huge building with three floors.

In 2012, Courtown Demesne was still up for sale, its asking price having been almost halved... to ten million euros. It is thanks to its proposed sale that we can see detailed shots of its exterior and interior: there is a gallery here on a property sales site; and you can download the detailed sales brochure for the property from sales agents Knight Frank here!

In Bradbury's account of his Irish experience with Huston, Green Shadows, White Whale, he describes a number of visits to Courtown. The most notable of these is in the chapter adapted from his short story "Banshee", where a fictionalised Bradbury visits his director with a finished draft of the Moby Dick screenplay, and manages for once to get the upper hand over Huston.

Bradbury's weekly trip out to Courtown - driven by Mike (in the book; Bradbury recalled his real name was Nick) - provided many of the ideas for his Irish tall tales which first emerged as short plays, later being re-written as short stories, before finally being incorporated into the grander narrative of Green Shadows, White Whale.

There's more about Bradbury's Irish experience in my earlier post on Bradbury's Dublin.

You Bet Your Life

In 1955, after completing his work on the screenplay for Moby Dick but before the film was released, a 35-year old Ray Bradbury made an appearance as a contestant on Groucho Marx's long-running game show You Bet Your Life. It seems to have been Ray's habit to go without glasses around this time, and this is how he appears in the show. Groucho must have been a complete blur to him, as Ray was severely short-sighted for all of his adult life (and even escaped conscription because his eyes were so bad).


Let's see how Ray Bradbury copes with these tough questions on movies:

Pursuing the Whale

My researches have recently turned back towards Ray Bradbury's work on Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) and - perhaps more importantly - the influence this experience had on his own later creations such as Leviathan '99, Something Wicked This Way Comes and Green Shadows, White Whale.

After watching the Huston movie again, I started casting around for behind-the-scenes information on the film, and stumbled on a fascinating post on a blog called Matte Shot: a Tribute to Golden Era Special Effects. It includes some rare images of the whale and boat miniatures used in the film, and some informed speculation on the craftsmen who brought the film's effects work to the screen. Read all about it here.

My own review of the film is here - although it really needs updating, since Bradbury's version of the screenplay has since been published, and shows that the vast majority of the film sticks to Bradbury's script, although the final act shows some small but significant deviations from it, especially in the behaviour and implied motivations of Starbuck.

Rosebud

Bradburymedia has been rather quiet of late. There's no big explanation for this, other than my general state of busy-ness... partly connected to my resolution to complete a cover-to-cover reading of Moby Dick in two weeks or less.

Of course, when John Huston invited Ray Bradbury to write a screenplay for Moby Dick in the 1950s, Bradbury replied "But I've never been able to finish the damned thing." Me neither, until now.

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A new issue of Rosebud magazine is now available, issue 53. This is "the magazine for people who enjoy good writing", and which has in the past included a fair amount of Bradbury-related material:

• Rosebud 25 featured “Last Rites,” a reprint of an earlier Bradbury story (also collected in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales and Quicker than the Eye)
• Rosebud 28 featured “To Ireland,” a poem by Bradbury, and “Rendezvous with Ray Bradbury,” an article by Laura Treacy Bentley
• Rosebud 34 featured “The Trivial Pursuits Transporter,” a short story by Ray Bradbury which has yet to appear in a Bradbury collection
• Rosebud 39 featured an exclusive interview with Ray Bradbury by Gregory Miller
• Rosebud 52 featured Bill Goodwin’s “Citizen Ray,” an essay about his friendship with Bradbury

All issues are still available for purchase from the Rosebud online store - most for $6.95, but issue 34 with its uncollected Bradbury story will set you back a cool $100.

There's no Bradbury in issue 53, but I understand from editor Rod Clarke that there will be something about Bradbury in the next issue. More details to follow.

(My thanks to Eric Carter for pulling the information together on Bradbury appearances in Rosebud back issues.)

Locus Award Ballot

It's that time of year: Locus magazine has opened to the poll for the Locus Awards. These awards honour the best published works in the science fiction and fantasy fields. The ballot is open to all, and can be accessed here:

http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2012/PollAndSurvey.html

I'm not directly familiar with many of the works listed - life's too short! - but I would draw your attention to Jon Eller's excellent biographical work Becoming Ray Bradbury. This gives a detailed, thorough account of how Bradbury became the author he is, through an examination of the influences that acted on him during his early career. It will be getting my vote.

Incidentally, Jon tells me that he is two-thirds of the way through writing the sequel to Becoming Ray Bradbury, a volume which will cover the period 1953-1972. This is the stage of Bradbury's career where he goes off to Ireland to write Moby Dick for John Huston, and comes back a changed man: a screenwriter, playwright, poet and (shortly afterwards, as the space age gets going) media ambassador for the science fiction field which he had all but left behind. This second volume will appear on a future Locus ballot paper...