From Dark Carnival to The Small Assassin...

You'd be forgiven for getting confused over the apparently endless re-shuffling of stories between Ray Bradbury's early collections. I know I am.

To clear my own mind, I created this table which shows the six basic editions of Dark Carnival, The October Country and The Small Assassin.

To get some insight into why this re-shuffling came about, read my "Lockdown posts" on those three books. But, in brief, it was a combination of editor preference for each edition, combined with Bradbury opportunistically tweaking his table of contents each time a new edition was in preparation.

Bradbury once wrote something to the effect that he didn't believe in re-writing his younger self, and that he let his books stand as originally written. Please don't believe him. It's just not true. Ray was an inveterate re-writer and table-of-contents-tweaker!

The table below puts the various stories in alphabetical order. And it probably has some errors, although I've double-checked it eight times over... Click on the table to make it bigger.

The Dark Carnival/October Country/Small Assassin re-shuffle. Click to embiggen.

Short Film Win

Chris Charles' short film The Small Assassin, based on the Bradbury story of the same name, has won an award at a film festival in Illinois. It picked up a $1000 first prize at the Elgin Film Festival. The full story is here.

You can read my 2008 review of the film here, although it's possible that the version in the festival is a different edit of the film. Although the film has been in existence for a few years, it's only this year that it has had its official world premiere, and has been touring the festival circuit to some great success.

You can view the press kit for the film here, and find out more about the makers (working under the company name of Beverly Ridge Pictures) here.

RBT: Top Ten Episodes

Someone over on IMDB has posted a list of their top ten episodes of Ray Bradbury Theatre. It's an interesting list, and inevitably got me thinking about my favourite episodes.

In some cases, "best episode" would coincide with "best story" - but in other cases, this simple equation doesn't hold. There are great stories that made good episodes, such as "The Long Years" and "A Sound of Thunder"... but also great stories that didn't turn out so well on screen, such as "Skeleton" (which I tend to think is almost unfilmable), "The Man Upstairs" (just too badly made) and "Tyrannosaurus Rex" (please don't make me watch that one again).



The best episodes strike a happy balance of fulfilling our memory of the story, but surprising us with something unexpected in the plotting, shooting or - more often than not - in the casting or performances. I quite like "Gotcha" and "The Crowd", although they both look quite dated. "The Small Assassin" never fails to hold my attention, largely thanks to Cyril Cusack's turn as the doctor. "Mars is Heaven!" is just about as good as it could be on TV - although I think radio is capable of doing this story more effectively. And "Emissary" and "By the Numbers" are always watchable.



Looking over the entire episode list again, I am reminded that Ray Bradbury Theatre started with great promise - look at the cast list: William Shatner, Jeff Goldblum, Drew Barrymore! It then shifted in subsequent seasons into a really mixed bag of international co-productions, with dreadfully variable production values. But toward the end, it hit its stride, and produced some strong, consistent episodes.

What are your top ten episodes?