Bradbury 100 LIVE

On Saturday 21st August - the eve of Ray Bradury's 101st birthday - I took to the "airwaves" of Facebook with another live edition of Bradbury 100.

I was joined over Zoom by writer and former Hollywood animation producer Steven Paul Leiva. Steve knew Ray Bradbury well, having worked with him on the abortive Little Nemo In Slumberland film project, and having organised "Ray Bradbury Week" in Los Angeles in 2010. Steve was also the very first interview guest on the Bradbury 100 audio podcast about a year ago, and it was great to talk to him again.

The live show was recorded, and below you will find a slightly remastered version of the show. Highlights of the show:

• never-before-seen photos from Ray's 90th birthday party
• never-before-seen video from the same party
• Steve's inside scoop on what went wrong (and occasionally right) with Little Nemo in Slumberland
• discussion of Ray and his good friend, the animation legend Chuck Jones

You can find out more about Steven Paul Leiva on his blog, which also has information on his books, which I heartily recommend.

The Ray Bradbury Read, Los Angeles

Bradbury Read - event in Los Angeles

I'm pleased to announce that I have been invited to join the advisory board for The Ray Bradbury Read, an event scheduled for Ray's birthday, 22nd August. It will take place in Maguire Gardens, adjacent to Ray's beloved Los Angeles Library, and Ray Bradbury Square - the intersection named in Ray's honour in 2012.

The event is the work of Steven Paul Leiva, who was instrumental in the naming of Ray Bradbury Square and in the creation of Ray Bradbury Week in 2010.

Full details of the event can be found on Steven's blog, here:

http://stevenpaulleivasthisnthat.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/announcing-new-tribute-to-ray-bradbury.html

Bradbury "Ice Cream Suit" Event in California

If you are near Pomona, California, in mid-October, here's a unique event: a screening of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, with a panel on the making of the film. It's to support Pomona Public Library.

The film was scripted by Ray Bradbury, based on his short story and play, and was directed for Disney by Stuart Gordon - a director better known for his work in the horror genre. Gordon will be on the discussion panel, along with two of the film's stars: Joe Mantegna and Edward James Olmos.

And if that weren't enough, the panel will be joined by Bradbury's authorised biographer Sam Weller, and chaired by organiser of Los Angeles' Ray Bradbury Week, Steven Paul Leiva.

Full details of the 12th October event are here.

Ray Bradbury Library Dedication

Last Monday saw the dedication of the Los Angeles Palms-Rancho Park Library in honour of Ray Bradbury. In attendance for the event were Steven Paul Leiva, three of Ray's daughters (Susan, Bettina and Ramona), Harlan Ellison and George Clayton Johnson.

Also present were many friends and fans of Bradbury (and Harlan and George) with their many cameras, making this one of the best-documented of Bradbury events. I was not present myself (my excuse being that I live on a different continent...) but John King Tarpinian provides a full account of  the day at File 770.

After the formal dedication, Leiva, Ellison and Johnson held a discussion of their memories of Bradbury. Steven spoke of his professional relationship with Ray, which began with their work on the abortive attempt to make a film of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo (a film was eventually made, but without Bradbury's screenplay). Harlan spoke of how he and Ray would argue good-naturedly over their entirely opposing view of how the world is. George spoke of how he was always in awe of Ray's talent and generosity.

The whole discussion is preserved on video, on Harlan's Youtube Channel and also in this recording from Daniel Lambert. Although the Lambert version has a shorter running time, it does include a few additional minutes at the end of the panel which are omitted from the Harlan Channel version.

 Library poster for the event

Harlan with a school group before the discussion panel

The panel discussion was held in a room which had already been dedicated to Bradbury some years ago

Steven Leiva, Harlan Ellison, George Clayton Johnson

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Harlan demonstrates the correct way to sign one's books - after hilariously describing Bradbury's insistence on using a thick marker pen for his book signings

Los Angeles Event - one week from today

From Steven Paul Leiva, the man behind Ray Bradbury Week in 2010: an event for 22 August, the 93rd anniversary of Bradbury's birth.

Searching for Ray Bradbury

I'm rather late in posting this, but Bradburymedia has suffered while I've been busy in recent weeks...

At the end of May, Steven Leiva celebrated two things: his own birthday, and the launch of his book of writings about Bradbury, Searching for Ray Bradbury. I still need to get round to writing a review of the book, but for now I'll just say that it's a convenient gathering together of Steven's articles which have appeared in a range of publications over the last few years.

Steven Leiva took a leaf out of Bradbury's book (so to speak) by choosing to celebrate his birthday in Glendale's Mystery and Imagination bookshop. Photos and an account of the event are on Steven's blog, here.

Books on Bradbury, new and forthcoming

It's nearly a year since Ray Bradbury died, but interest in his work continues, as evidenced in a number of books newly released or announced.

Searching for Ray Bradbury is a slim, inexpensive volume from Bradbury's friend and collaborator Steven Paul Leiva. It collects Steven's writings on Ray, previously published in various newspapers, magazines and websites. I'm currently reading this book, and will be reviewing it here in the near future. For now, I'll just say that it captures some of the spirit of celebration of the events Steven co-ordinated in recent years, such as Los Angeles' Ray Bradbury Week and the dedication of Ray Bradbury Square.

Nolan on Bradbury is William F. Nolan's return to writing about his lifelong friend. A highlight of Nolan's early career was his publication of The Ray Bradbury Review, the first study of any aspect of Bradbury's work. Nolan would soon develop a career as a creative writer which paralleled Bradbury's, with work in the fields of SF, fantasy, horror and crime fiction, and with significant excursions into screenwriting. Nolan's list of significant books includes the novel Logan's Run (written with George Clayton Johnson) and the scrapbook-style The Ray Bradbury Companion. Now Nolan on Bradbury promises to collect "sixty years of writing" about Bradbury, and is adorned with a Joe Mugnaini rendering of Bradbury's "The Pedestrian". I hope to review this book soon.

Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys is William Touponce's latest study, attempting to map Lovecraft's notion of spectral literature as "literature that involves the gothic themes of the supernatural found in the past but also concerned about modern society and humanity", and showing how his tradition or mode of writing developed through the twentieth-century. Bill's previous work on Bradbury is extensive, including the study Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction (written with Jon Eller) and directing the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies from 2007-2011. This book is listed for publication in October... the ideal month for Bradbury.

Finally a brief note on The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: a Critical Edition, Volume 2. I am pleased to report that I have been appointed as a consultant on this volume, which is currently approaching it's final shape. The contents of the volume are more or less settled, with just a few items of the critical apparatus still to be completed. I'll give more details when I can. (Volume 1, of course, is already available.)

Today: the naming of Ray Bradbury Square

Today is December 6th, and at 2pm in downtown Los Angeles the intersection of Fifth and Flower will be named as Ray Bradbury Square. I've blogged about it before, but the best explanation of what it's all about comes from the man who has made it all happen, Steven Paul Leiva. Steven wrote about it for the Huffington Post - read his article here.

Once again, here is the flyer for the dedication ceremony (cick to enlarge):

Ray Bradbury Square

The dedication of Ray Bradbury Square has been confirmed for Thursday 6th December at 2pm, and a list of speakers has been published.

Ray Bradbury Square is in Los Angeles, located at the intersection of Fifth St and Flower St. This very urban crossroads doesn't look like the sort of place Bradbury would identify with, but to one side of the  intersection is a small park adjacent to the Los Angeles Public Library. It is in this park that the dedicatory sign will be mounted... and now it all begins to make sense, since Bradbury is strongly identified with libraries.

The speakers at the dedication ceremony will include the actor Joe Mantegna, whose credits include the Bradbury-scripted The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. Others of note include the City's Librarian, John Szabo; the SF writer David Brin; Bradbury's daughter Sue Bradbury Nixon; Bradbury's biographer Sam Weller; and the co-ordinator of Ray Bradbury Week 2010, Steven Paul Leiva.

The event is open to the public. For more information, click on the flyer below.

Flyer - click to embiggen

Why Mars?

For most of the past year, I have immersed myself in Bradbury's unfilmed (and mostly unpublished) screenplay versions of The Martian Chronicles. One of the outputs from this research was a paper which I presented at the 2012 Science Fiction Research Association conference in Detroit. In the paper I attempted to unpick what Bradbury was trying to do in his early-1960s Chronicles film work.

Although the screenplays are adaptations of his book, each version takes on a different flavour. The published 1965 screenplay (found in the limited edition volume The Complete Martian Chronicles) appears to address, head on, the reasons we might be compelled to explore space. This is not entirely surprising, given that the script was written at the height of the space age, when the successes of the Mercury and Gemini programmes were coming thick and fast, and when Bradbury was himself becoming something of a spokesman for the space programme.

It was interesting, therefore, to see Steven Paul Leiva's excellent recent article "Ray Bradbury, the Masterheart of Mars" in which he identifies three reasons for going to Mars. Bradbury "instinctually understood" two of these, Leiva writes, and "was a poet of the third". Read the article at the KCET website, here. Steven, you may recall, was the organiser of "Ray Bradbury Week" in Los Angeles in 2010.

Steven Paul Leiva, pictured at Bradbury's 90th birthday party.

Steven has also been instrumental in the campaign over the Los Angeles Palms-Rancho Park branch library, which I recently reported on. He has pointed out that my report of the library's potential name change was incorrect: rather than being renamed in honour of Ray (something which isn't possible), the proposal is that the branch be dedicated to Ray.

This is how Steven, writing on Facebook, describes last week's meeting:

I spent the morning attending the monthly meeting of the LA Library Board of Commissioners, which - at the request of Councilmember Paul Koretz - was held at the Palms-Rancho Park Library. Also at Paul's request they gave consideration to the idea of dedicating the Palms to Ray. Several members of the public representing the neighborhood council and home owners association, the Greater Los Angeles Writers Club, and the Friends of the Palms Library spoke at the meeting and all very enthusiastically endorsed the idea. They all gave intelligent, passionate, and moving speeches. One broke into tears. At least one audience member started to weep (you know him, his name is Steven). Then the president of the council spoke, very tearfully, for the measure. It was moved and seconded -- and passed unanimously.

We now have to wait a mandate period of three months for public comment, but, essentially, it's a done deal!

The Palms-Rancho Park Library is very appropriate as this was Ray's local library, close to his home of over 50 years in Cheviot Hills. His daughters have very fond memories of Ray walking them to the library when they were children and spending much time there. Ray spoke there often and was a huge supporter of the library, as he was of all libraries. There is already a Ray Bradbury room at the Palms, but now the whole library will be dedicated to him.

The Leavetaking

Yesterday Ray Bradbury was laid to rest in a small-scale, private ceremony in Los Angeles. He is beside his wife Maggie in Westwood Village Memorial Park. As you can see from the list of others who have been buried there, Ray is also in company with many people he knew: writer Robert Bloch, screenwriter Harry Essex. cinematographer James Wong Howe, and the writer who gave him a huge break by rescuing one of his short stories from the reject pile, Truman Capote.

Discussions are underway for ways of remembering Ray: there is talk of a celebration of his life to be held either on his birthday (August) or at Halloween; there is talk of naming something after him in Los Angeles - something which was already under discussion in his lifetime, but which didn't come to fruition in time for Ray to see it; and calls for the Waukegan Public library to be renamed in his honour. Whether any or all of these tentative ideas come to pass remains to be seen, but I will post updates here if anything tangible emerges.



Tributes to Bradbury continue to appear, too many to link to. As before, I want to link just to the best of these:

• The Los Angeles Times has a report on the tributes from "ordinary" people.
• The Guardian carried an article by Margaret Atwood, in which she tries to uncover why Bradbury became such a widely treasured American writer. Atwood, the author of The Handmaid's Tale has had a career which in many ways reflects Bradbury's. Like him, she is novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter. Like him, she has had some tussles over whether her work is science fiction or something else. Curiously, her working definition of science fiction is almost opposite to Bradbury's. Bradbury's distinction between SF and fantasy was that SF (such as, for him, Fahrenheit 451) could happen, but fantasy (The Martian Chronicles) was about things that were impossible. Atwood, on the other hand, once dismissed SF by implying that it was about the impossible, famously using the phrase "talking squids in outer space".
• The organiser of Los Angeles' Ray Bradbury Week tributes in 2010, Steven Paul Leiva, has blogged some photos of himself and Ray, and a link to an interview he gave about Ray on an NPR station in LA.
• The Los Angeles Review of Books has completed its three day series of reflections on Bradbury's work with articles by (among others) Bradbury scholars Jon Eller, Robin Anne Reid and Bill Touponce, and SF/fantasy critics John Clute, Gary K. Wolfe and Rob Latham. Read all three parts with these links: part one, part two, part three. This last section contains essays which are probably the first since Bradbury's death to refer to shortcomings or disappointments with aspects of Bradbury's writing, and perhaps are a sign of how the scholarly community will now seek to grapple with what Bradbury's work really meant. I have no problem with this at all, but I do wonder whether some of the critics have read much of Bradbury's post-1962 writing.

Leiva Reviews Eller; Guardian Readers Review Truffaut

Steven Paul Leiva, the writer and producer who co-ordinated events for Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles in 2010, has written a review of Jon Eller's new book Becoming Ray Bradbury.


The review, for Neworld Review, is here.

My own review of Becoming Ray Bradbury is here, and the publisher's page for the book is here.


Meanwhile, over on The Guardian's website, the reading group for Fahrenheit 451 have been discussing Truffaut's 1966 film version of Bradbury's book. It's interesting to see how opinions remain divided on this film. On the one hand, it looks very much a child of the 1960s, but on the other hand the stylisation of the film is, I think, plainer to see forty-odd years on. My own view is that it's a fascinating film to watch, but is far from being a great film. But if you watch it in the context of the films Truffaut made before and after it, you can see how it is part of a continuum.