Ray Bradbury and THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Marc Scott Zicree, the writer-producer, and author of the excellent Twilight Zone Companion,  is working on a book about his ten-year-long friendship with Ray Bradbury. The working title is My Ray Bradbury.

When Zicree was working on The Twilight Zone Companion, he attempted to interview Bradbury about his involvement with that classic Rod Serling TV series. Bradbury wrote just one completed episode of the series, "I Sing The Body Electric," but also wrote a couple of unfilmed episodes. Bradbury also claimed a significant contribution to the very existence of the series: he reportedly introduced Serling to the writers Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, each of whom would write many episodes of the series.

Zicree's attempt to draw information out of Bradbury was thwarted back in the 1980s, but the two later became friends. Long after The Twilight Zone Companion was published, Zicree finally heard  Bradbury's account of how the relationship between Serling and Bradbury soured. Zicree recounts all of this in his latest "Mr Sci-Fi" video on YouTube.

Zicree slightly overstates things when he claims that none of this has been discussed before. In fact, much of Bradbury's account of events is given in Sam Weller's biography The Bradbury Chronicles. Nevertheless, Zicree's encyclopedic knowledge of Twilight Zone and Serling, and his friendship with Bradbury, make his telling of events fascinating and compelling. You can see the entire 24-minute video below.

There is, in fact, yet more to the Serling-Bradbury conflict. The Zicree video presents the Bradbury interpretation, but I have seen correspondence from the time which suggests an entire other dimension to the argument between the two great writers. Indeed, Jon Eller's new book Ray Bradbury Unbound (chapter 28) reveals much more of the Serling-Bradbury relationship, based on both the surviving correspondence and his own extensive interviews with Bradbury, giving the most detailed and insightful account yet published.

One day, perhaps, a fuller version of the story may emerge - but for now, Zicree's recounting of Bradbury's view is one of the best you will find.

(This blog post has been updated to include the reference to Ray Bradbury Unbound - 7 January 2014.)

The Elevator

Ray Bradbury is often thought of in connection with The Twilight Zone, partly because the series regularly dealt in distinctly Bradburyan stories, and partly because Bradbury did actually write for the series. Only one of his scripts was actually filmed, "I Sing The Body Electric!" - which is sometimes referred to as an adaptation of his short story. In reality, the script was written long before the short story was published, so it would be more correct to say that the story is an adaptation of the script.

Bradbury's experience with The Twilight Zone - or more specifically with the show's host and creator Rod Serling - was an unhappy one, due in part to Bradbury's feeling that Serling had borrowed from his work without credit, and cut Bradbury's scripts without consultation.

When The Twilight Zone was revived in the 1980s, there was no particular reason that Bradbury should be (or should want to be) involved, but he did contribute one short script to the series, called "The Elevator". Writer-producer Alan Brennert recently mentioned on Facebook how this Bradbury contribution came about:

I guess with Ray gone now I can reveal that he really, really didn't want to have anything to do with The Twilight Zone after his bad experience with Rod Serling on the old show. "The Burning Man" was a different matter, it was an existing script by J.D. Feigelson, one of Ray's literary "godsons" to which he gave his blessing. But in order to get an original script out of him, Harlan [Ellison] took him to lunch and sweet-talked him (and when Harlan wants to, can he sweet-talk!) into giving us a script, and Ray gave us "The Elevator." 

"The Burning Man" is an episode I have written about before; I consider it to be one of the best-ever adaptations of a Bradbury story.

Harlan Ellison was a creative consultant on the show, and was a longtime friend of Bradbury.

RIP: Roberts Blossom

Some sad news: the actor Roberts Blossom has died at the age of 87. He was in lots of great films, usually in small, quirky roles. But for me, he is a definitive Bradbury character: the Burning Man, in J.D.Feigelson's Twilight Zone episode.

Read the New York Times obituary here - and my review of "The Burning Man" here.

Bradbury in song, Joe Messerli

The other day I stumbled across a blog post quoting the singer-songwriter Janis Ian and mentioning Ray Bradbury. It was a bit like walking into the middle of a conversation, in that I got the gist of what was being discussed, but had no idea of how the conversation got started.

Clicking around a bit, I eventually realised that singer-songwriter Janis Ian, probably best known for her 1975 song "At Seventeen", had produced a variation on that song called "Welcome Home (The Nebulas Song)", which can be downloaded here. The song contains dozens of SF references - authors, stories, novels, characters and situations.

The song was mentioned on Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog, to which Janis posted a comment in which she identifies and explains all the references.

If you know a bit about SF, I think you should listen to the song first, and only afterwards read the explanation. See how many of the references you pick up!

By the way, Bradbury is name-checked in the first line.




Joe Messerli died last Wednesday at the age of 79. Who he? Only the guy who designed the Twilight Zone, that's all! He also worked on the title sequence of Bonanza, and was an animator and comic book artist. Read an obituary for Joe Messerli here. Read more about Joe's career on his own website, here.




There's more on Bradbury's (video screen) appearance at the recent Ray Harryhausen 90th birthday event at the Guardian's Film Blog.

New Bottles, Vintage Wine...

The long-running audio drama version of The Twilight Zone will shortly feature a dramatisation of "I Sing the Body Electric!", the only episode of the original TV series to be scripted by Ray Bradbury. According to the TZ Radio Drama blog, Dennis Etchison has written the new version to take into account not just the original episode, but some of Bradbury's ideas which didn't make it to screen.

"I Sing..." is actually one of the strangest items in Bradbury's back catalogue. The short story is quite well known - from the eponymous short story collection first published in 1969 - but not many people know that the story first saw light of day as the Twilight Zone episode, which Bradbury scripted c.1960. This puts "I Sing..." in the same category as The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes: a Bradbury media creation which only later became a literary text.


Here's an item to file under "wish I'd been there" heading: on 17 March in Fresno, California, there was a two-day symposium on Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The event tied in with the Big Read campaign. The event was moderated by writer and academic Howard V. Hendrix, who I met in 2008 at the Eaton Conference where we both presenting papers on Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Fresno seems quite keen on F451...


It looks as if the ghastly cover of The Stories of Ray Bradbury, in print in hardcover from Knopf since 1980, is soon to vanish, replaced by this new cover with the Everyman label. As far as I know, this is all that's changed about the book, apart from (possibly) a new introduction. The publisher's page for this new edition is here.

To tie in with the new edition, the Wall Street Journal has a new interview with Ray.

One of the Missing

One of the Missing is a film originally produced for public television in the US. It was written and directed by J.D. Feigelson, and based on a short story by Ambrose Bierce.

The 2006 DVD release features a restored version of the film, with enhanced visuals and a few minutes of material cut from the original broadcast version. It also includes a brief introduction by Ray Bradbury from one of its public television screenings in the 1970s, and from the same screening Bradbury interviewing Feigelson.

The story is one of Bierce's American Civil War stories, taken from the collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. It concerns a soldier on a scouting mission who finds himself trapped in a collapsed building. The story is similar in tone to Bierce's more well known Civil War story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", a story whose fame has no doubt been enhanced by television adaptations on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.


Feigelson's film takes a couple of liberties with the source material (his scout is a confederate, Bierce's was from the other side!), but creates a strong dramatisation of the story. He does this with minimal dialogue, and with a deftly created image system. Watch for the parallels between the actual Civil War photo at the beginning, the soldier trapped beneath a fallen tree, a spider web in a flashback, and the final shot of the film.


It is rare for Ray Bradbury to act as the host of a TV show - Ray Bradbury Theater being the one exception. So what led him to take this "job"?

There seems to be a couple of answers to this. Judging by his comments in the introduction and interview, he seems to be an admirer of Bierce. But the main reason is that Bradbury was Feigelson's mentor. This isn't mentioned in the video content of the DVD, but is discussed in the director biography on the disc.


In the interview, Bradbury and Feigelson discuss their shared love of Hitchcock - one of Feigelson's influences in the styling of One of the Missing. They also discuss previous adaptations of Bierce, such as the Twilight Zone episode.

Some years after One of the Missing, Bradbury would be instrumental in landing Feigelson a job on the revived version of The Twilight Zone. Feigelson would write and direct "The Burning Man", in my view one of the best adaptations of a Bradbury story. You can read my review of this episode, and more information about how Feigelson got the job, here.


One of the Missing is an interesting DVD, but something of an oddity. The film is less than an hour in length, and is something of a slow starter. The DVD commentary is shared between Feigelson and a producer, and although it contains some interesting insights, they spend much of the time describing the story.

There is also some confusion over when the film was actually made. According to the DVD sleeve and IMDB, it was 1979. But according to the copyright date at the end of the film it was 1969 - and during the DVD commentary Feigelson mentions shooting in 1968.

I wouldn't recommend buying the DVD just for the Bradbury content (which amounts to about fifteen minutes at best), but if you like a suspenseful, visual and short Civil War movie, this is a good one!

Russian Bradbury

Ray Bradbury's work seems to be quite well known in Russia (and the rest of the former Soviet Union). Several Russian-language films have been based on his works, often without his permission: Vel'd (1987), Trinadtsatyj Apostol (1988), Vino Iz Oduvanchikov (1997).

Two of the short animated films have recently popped up on YouTube. The most interesting of these is There Will Come Soft Rains (1984). In some ways more bleak than the Bradbury original, this film also seems to make some comment on religion, or Christianity, or western values. You can view the film, with English subtitles, here.

Less interesting, and rather primitive in its animation, is Here There Be Tygers. I know very little about this film, except that it is based on the story of the same name (which has been adapted once for live action, in the Ray Bradbury Theater series; Bradbury also wrote a teleplay of the story for the original Twilight Zone series in the 1960s, but it was never filmed). You can view the animated film, with English subtitles, here. Until this version appeared on YouTube, I had never seen a subtitled version; it's nice to be able to understand what's going on in the film!

"The Burning Man"

One of the best Bradbury adaptations in the visual media was a modest entry in the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone. "The Burning Man" is only eleven minutes long, and is based on Bradbury's short story of the same name. The writer and director of the adaptation was J.D.Feigelson.

Feigelson took Bradbury's story, looked at the central metaphors - the idea of evil being perpetually reborn, like locusts that return every seventeen years; and the idea that we all go a little crazy in the heat - and ran with them. This is by far the best way to capture the spirit of Bradbury; instead of slavishly keeping the plot but losing the imagery, you cling to the imagery and let the plot slide where necessary.

As it happens, Feigelson made very few changes to the story, just enough to vary the pace and, more importantly, to emphasise the drama in the dialogue.

Bradbury's story may be flawed (is it locusts that rise up out of the earth, or is it cicadas?), but Feigelson has captured the look and the feel of Bradbury's original. It has marvellous performances, particularly from Roberts Blossom as the crazy old guy.

"The Burning Man" features characters called Aunt Neva and Doug (probably Douglas Spaulding, although this isn't specified). Both names are familiar from other Bradbury stories. Bradbury really did have an aunt called Neva - there is a picture in Nard's gallery ("Ray Bradbury Personal Photos #2").