A Lockdown Pause: Images in Ray Bradbury Stories

Something a little different today, as I take a brief pause from my Lockdown Choices series...

Some years ago, I presented a paper on images in Bradbury's fiction, at a conference in France. Note the term "images", rather than "imagery". The point being: I talked about how characters within Bradbury stories experience images such as photographs, paintings and tattoos.

As is my wont, I made a Powerpoint slide show to illustrate my talk. And now, these many years later, I've glued the slide show to a recording of me reading the paper. Here it is, for your delectation and delight. (Click the little square in the corner to make it fill the screen.)

By the way, my pronunciation of "Peirce" is correct. I say this to forestall a load of comments from those who assume it is pronounced the same as "pierce"...

If you'd prefer to read the paper, you can find it on my Academia page, here.

Free Reading!

I finally got round to putting a batch of my Ray Bradbury writings online. You can view them on Academia here: https://wlv.academia.edu/PhilNichols

All of the articles are pre-publication versions, which means that there may have been some edits/alterations/corrections in the versions that were later published.

I can't claim any of these pieces to be highly academic, since I much prefer to write in plain English for a general reader. If you're looking for high theory, you've come to the wrong place. I'm probably most happy with the more recent articles, but the two pieces on Ray Bradbury and BBC radio show the best bits of original research.

New Book: SF Across Media

At long last, we have a publication date for a book containing one of my essays. Science Fiction Across Media: Adaptation/Novelization is due out on 16th September 2013. The book originated in the 2009 conference of the same name, which was held at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

My chapter is about Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" and the ways it has been treated in difference media adaptations. I wrote it so long ago that I can barely remember what it's about (and so long ago that I will probably cringe at some of the things I say in it). I do recall that I refer to the story; to Bradbury's own TV dramatisation of the story; to Peter Hyams' disappointing film expansion of the story; and to several illustrators' treatment of the story's imagery.

Interestingly, the book's editors (Thomas Van Parys and I.Q.Hunter) or publishers (Gylphi Press) have chosen to use another Bradbury adaptation to illustrate the cover: Fahrenheit 451. It shows Cyril Cusack as Fire Chief Beatty warming his hands over some burning books while Oskar Werner looks on.

Bradbury, Ellison: Writing for the Screen

Last week I attended the Eaton Science Fiction Conference (which this year was combined with the Science Fiction Research Association conference) in Riverside, California, to present a paper on the screenwriting styles of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison.

The overall conference programme was ridiculously full, with seven simultaneous panels for most of the conference's three days. This is an amazing expansion since my first Eaton in 2008, which just had a single strand of panels.

My paper was part of a panel I had proposed on screenwriting. The paper title was "Screenwriting: Spectacle, Specificity and Speculative Fiction", and my intention was to illuminate the challenge of writing a screenplay for an imagined world, using examples from the scripts of Bradbury and Ellison to show two distinct strategies.

Bradbury tended to write non-technical scripts, resulting in a style of script which looks for all the world like a modern-day "spec script" - although he developed this style as early as the mid-1950s. Ellison, on the other hand, developed his craft in television in the early 1960s, in a time when it was common practice for the scriptwriter to write more or less in a shooting-script format, a style which is generally more prescriptive and more technical in terms of camera directions.

Over time, Bradbury's style became more and more simplified, and his scripts tend to read like very clear short stories. The heavy use of metaphor we often find in his short stories is largely absent, however, as he recognised how important it was to be unambiguous in describing a fantastical world in a screenplay. Ellison, on the other hand, developed a remarkable specificity in his scripts, which makes for some stunning visual concepts which challenge the director and production team to match his vision.

Time permitting, I intend to develop the paper for journal publication.

The other contributors to the panel were Julian Hoxter of San Francisco State University, author of Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters (New York: Continuum, 2011) and Michael Klein of James Madison University. Julian spoke on the emergence of the "spec script" format and its impact on action in blockbuster movies. Michael spoke on the mythos of Frankenstein as it developed in both Shelley's original novel and its first film adaptation. I learned a lot from both presentations, and appreciated both speakers' contribution to the panel.

Conferring on Bradbury

On Friday 29 June I will be presenting a paper at the SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association) conference in Detroit, Michigan. My paper is about the way Bradbury used the end of the world as a device in The Martian Chronicles screenplays, and in comparison with his original book. When I initially proposed the paper, I envisaged writing about all sorts of other Bradburyan apocalypses, but when it came to drafting it, it became obvious that a twenty-minute paper wouldn't allow room.

Joining me on the Bradbury-themed panel will be Jon Eller of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University, and Adam Frisch of Briar Cliff University (a past-president of SFRA).

The conference guest of honour is Eric Rabkin, who has himself written and lectured about Bradbury in the past.

The last scheduled panel in the conference (on Saturday afternoon) will be a "Bradbury memorial". I will be moderating this session, and will be showing a selection of rare Bradbury video clips.

Full details of the SFRA conference can be found here.

Update!

I've just returned from a conference in Lorient, France (see this earlier post for details) where I discussed my researches into Bradbury's screenwriting. It was a small conference, but with some very interesting papers. The conference was very much focused on screenwriting as an art, a practice and an industrial process.

I have presented papers on Bradbury in a number of different contexts. Sometimes it will be to an audience of science fiction experts. Sometimes to scholars of American literature. Sometimes to researchers in the field of media adaptation. But I think presenting to other people who are doing screenwriting research has proven to be the "right" context; there was much more commonality among this group than among many of the other groups I have engaged with.

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Last night saw the unveiling of sculptor Christopher Slatoff's statue inspired by Ray Bradbury, variously known as "Father Electrico" and "The Illustrated Man". John King Tarpinian attended the event and reports that there was a good turnout, both of patrons of the arts and Bradbury supporters. Below are two of John's photos, showing the actor Michael Prichard (who has played in a number of Bradbury productions, including the role of Beatty in Fahrenheit 451) and a rear view of the sculpture. Other views of the piece can be found here on the sculptor's website.

Fire Chief Beatty - actor Michael Prichard addresses the gathering. Photo courtesy John King Tarpinian. (Click to enlarge.)

Fr Electrico/The Illustrated Man. Photo courtesy John King Tarpinian. (Click to enlarge.)

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In case you were wondering:



Bradburymedia has been a little quiet of late. In mid-December I had a slightly quiet period in which I was able to stack up some posts, which I then set up to appear every few days over the weeks ahead. Shortly after doing this, my dad was taken seriously ill and then passed away just before Christmas. The blog posts continued appearing automatically until they ran out, and until now I didn't have time to get back to the blog.


Life is now slowly returning to normal - the conference I just attended in France is (I hope!) the last "abnormal" thing of the season, and real soon now it should be business as usual for me.

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.

Bradbury in...Belgium!

I'm recently returned from Belgium, where I presented a paper at the "Science Fiction Across Media: Adaptation/Novelisation" conference. My paper, entitled "Adaptive Behaviours", was another in my series exploring ways in which Bradbury's prose fictions adapt to other media. This time I focused on the short story "A Sound of Thunder" and discussed key adaptations for TV and film, as well as various graphic adaptations. It was an elaboration of some ideas I first considered in this post.

Also presenting at the conference was Aristea Chryssohou of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who did an excellent analysis of Francois Truffaut's film version of Fahrenheit 451.

There were additional delights of being in Belgium, one of which was the opportunity to visit the iconic Atomium. Although this has no direct connection to Bradbury, there are certain thematic connections, which I hope to blog about soon.

Time to confer...

I recently returned from Orlando, Florida, where I presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The conference theme was "Time and the Fantastic", and my paper was on Ray Bradbury's use of time.

Before writing the paper, I doodled a spider diagram containing as many Bradbury stories I could think of which had a significant, fantastical use of time. Every couple of days I would remember another story with a time theme and add to my arachnid scrawl.

From the doodle, I eventually chose to focus on four major recurring uses of time in Bradbury stories:

• SF-style time travel (as in "A Sound of Thunder" and "The Fox in the Forest"
• Time travel in service of wish-fulfillment (as in "The Kilimanjaro Device")
• Fantastic evocation of the past (as in "A Scent of Sarsaparilla")
• Encounters with the younger or older self (as in "A Touch of Petulance", and the stage play of Dandelion Wine

Of course, by choosing this topic I was opening one enormous can of worms...nearly every Bradbury story makes use of time in some fantastical way. However, it has given me plenty of material for future study and has already suggested further papers.

Speaking of which, I have another paper to present at "SF Across Media", a conference to be held at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Fortunately, the conference is in English - my Flemish isn't up to much!

In this paper, I will be looking at adaptations of "A Sound of Thunder" in various media.

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.

The NEXT Eaton Conference

Plans have begun for the next Eaton Conference, to be held in May 2009. It's themed around Jules Verne.

The breaking news is: the second Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award will be going to...(roll on the drums, please)... Mr Frederik Pohl!

This latter information comes from an interview with Melissa Conway, published here. Official conference details are to be found here.

The first recipient of the award was, of course, Ray Bradbury - seen above with Fred Pohl at the 2008 conference, where I presented a paper.

Video Clips

Almost forgotten, tucked away on the memory card of my stills cameras, I have two video clips from the recent Eaton Conference, "Chronicling Mars". As a lecturer in Video and Film Production, I can't say I am proud of the technical quality of the picture or sound, but they were taken very much as an afterthought - as, sitting in the audience for Ray Bradbury's presentation, I suddenly remembered that my stills camera also recorded video clips.

So, for posterity, here are my two clips of Bradbury in action.

First, Ray at the start of his presentation:






Second, Ray answers a question about the character of Fedallah in his screen adaptation of Moby Dick (1956):

Eaton Conference 2008: Chronicling Mars

From 16th to 18th May 2008, I attended the J.Lloyd Eaton Conference at the University of California, Riverside. I presented a paper entitled "Re-Presenting Mars: Ray Bradbury's Martian Stories in Media Adaptation".

On the panel with me were two Bradbury-related speakers. The noted SF editor, publisher and anthologist David Hartwell spoke on "The Non-Scientific Mars from Burroughs, Brackett & Bradbury to Today". And from Collin College (McKinney, Texas), Eric Palfreyman spoke on "Mars is Heaven: Ray Bradbury's Martian Landscape as a Mythological Setting for his Philosophical and Religious Ideas".

Our panel chair was USC's Paul Alkon, who gave each of us a Mars bar. Highly appropriate!

The panel was privileged in being scheduled immediately before the star attractions: a talk by leading author Kim Stanley Robinson, and a special presentation by Ray Bradbury himself. The conference chairs had warned delegates that if they weren't in the conference hall early, they may not get a seat for the Bradbury talk. And so it was that David, Eric and I were blessed (or cursed) with having the largest audience of the entire conference.

Stan Robinson - with whom I had I very brief chat while looking at old astronomical images of Mars - gave a fascinating account of his dealings with the planet Mars (through his terraforming novel trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars). He made it clear how indebted he is, and other Mars writers are, to Ray Bradbury for his master work The Martian Chronicles (1950).

Bradbury's talk covered his life and career, and his involvement with Mars. It was followed by a question and answer session, and a mammoth book-signing session.

In attendance for the Bradbury presentation were fellow raybradbury.com Message Board members Nard, Doug Spaulding, and jkt. When added to conference delegates philnic, Mr Dark and PatR, this probably made the biggest Board gathering of recent times.

Following the Bradbury talk, a select few (self-selected for the most part) retired to a buffet with Mr B. Much talk and photo-taking followed.

To see my photos of the conference, click on the image below:

When Genres Collide

Publishing is quite a slow business. It's over a year since I presented a paper about Bradbury's Leviathan '99 at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in New York... but the book of the conference has only just come out.

When Genres Collide: Selected essays from the 37th annual meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, edited by Tom Morrissey and Oscar De Los Santos, includes a diverse array of papers on various aspects of science fiction. My paper appears in a section alongside papers on Philip K. Dick and Norman Spinrad. Other delights include Lincoln Geraghty on 1980s Hollywood science fiction, and Adam Frisch on the Byronic hero in science fiction.

The book is now available from Amazon (direct link here) and other fine bookstores.

Conference Presentation

I nearly forgot to blog this one...

On Saturday I presented another conference paper on Ray Bradbury. This one, at the second Edge Hill Short Story Conference, was about three Bradbury short stories which have been adapted many times for radio, film and television: "Mars is Heaven", "Zero Hour" and "The Veldt".

The aim of the paper was to gather some thoughts on why some stories retain their popularity through repeated re-tellings. There are two areas that intrigued me when I was doing the research for the paper, and I hope to follow up on these at a later date.

The first is that some of the stories work reasonably well even when stripped of their original background or "landscape". This thought occurred to me when listening to various cold-war era radio adaptations of "Zero Hour", which still work (just) without the science fictional background elements that feature prominently in Bradbury's short story.

The second is that Bradbury's poetic prose style - throwing out metaphor after metaphor in the white heat of progressing the narrative - invites an "inner life" for the story in the mind of the reader. This, I believe, is part of Bradbury's appeal to his readers. And since each reader will conjure up subtly different mental images as they read, so (possibly) the stories invite multiple, variant adaptations.

I am currently working on some more Bradbury papers (don't ask me how I find the time) for the proposed New Ray Bradbury Review. I understand that this is likely to see print early next year.

Adaptations

I'm currently researching adaptations of three Bradbury stories: "Mars is Heaven!", "Zero Hour" and "The Veldt". It's for a paper I'm preparing to deliver at a conference in July.

I've chosen these particular stories because they seem to be recurringly popular, with repeated adaptations for radio and television.

"Mars is Heaven" is an interesting case because Bradbury himself has adapted it on more than one occasion. The original short story appeared in Planet Stories in 1948. Bradbury then converted it into "The Third Expedition", a chapter of his novelised story cycle The Martian Chronicles. In the 1960s he wrote the first of several screenplays of the Chronicles, and in the 1970s the stage play version. And in the 1980s he wrote a teleplay for Ray Bradbury Theater.

The story is unusual, in that it combines the small-town USA sensibilities of some of his other work (Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes) with a Martian setting.

Listening to various radio adaptations, I have been intrigued that Ernest Kinoy's 1950s Dimension X/X Minus One script uses a rooster as the first signifier that the Earthmen might still be on Earth rather than on Mars. This element isn't present in Bradbury's short story, nor in The Martian Chronicles. However, in Bradbury's 1980s teleplay for Ray Bradbury Theater there's that rooster again. Has Bradbury borrowed from Kinoy? Or was Kinoy working from a different draft of Bradbury's story?

Talking about Ray

In June (told you it was a busy month!) I also presented a paper on Ray Bradbury to the Science Fiction Research Association Conference in New York State. I've been to academic conferences before, but this was my first presenting stint. Thankfully, the audience wasn't so huge as turn me to jelly.

The paper was the one mentioned earlier, on Leviathan '99. I have submitted the paper for possible publication in the conference book.

Funding for my trip was provided by my employer, the University of Wolverhampton, to whom I am immensely grateful.

Apart from the presenting, the highlight of the conference was listening to Norman Spinrad, the science fiction writer and critic. Although I think I may have upset him a bit by asking what had happened to the proposed film version of his novel Bug Jack Barron.

"Didn't Harlan Ellison write a screenplay for it?" I ask.
"Ellison wrote a screenplay," Spinrad replies.
"Was there more than one?"
"Ellison wrote a screenplay, I wrote a screenplay, Peter Weir wrote half a screenplay. Universal Studios now owns the whole damned thing, forever."

I also met Andy Sawyer of the Science Fiction Foundation and the University of Liverpool's SF Hub. Many years ago I used to write book reviews and type copy for Paperback Inferno, which Andy edited - and yet we never met, until SFRA 2006 in New York.