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.

Fahrenheit 451 Marathon Read

Mark DiPietro of the Edge Ensemble Theatre Company contacted me to pass on news of an event on 11 May 2013: a marathon reader's theatre presentation of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The venue is Heberton Hall-Keene Public Library Annex in Keene, New Hampshire.

Mark writes:

"The whole idea is that 'getting lost in a good book' is something that's disappeared for many people, especially young people, with smart phones, iPods, iPads and earbuds stuck calling to them continuously. (Bradbury even foretold the earbud sensation in Fahrenheit 451, with the omnipresent 'seashells' that preoccupied Mildred Montag.) Marathon reads - i.e., reading an entire work of literature in a single setting - have been catching on at many colleges and high schools. (Here's a story from the New York Times about college campuses doing marathons of War and Peace, Paradise Lost, and other literary works.

We got the idea after hearing about these other marathons and decided that Bradbury's novel would be the perfect length and subject matter to stage our own marathon. The Edge Ensemble has recruited students from four schools in Southwestern New Hampshire as our readers/performers, along with community members and Edge Ensemble performers. We're also working with 5th- through 8th-graders who are members of an Opera Club at a local elementary school. The students are writing an original opera based on Fahrenheit 451 called "Operas Burning," which they'll perform in June at the Colonial Theatre in Keene. The Edge Ensemble is working with the students on performing techniques, and the students will attend the marathon theatre production on May 11.

Our goal is to make this a public event and get as many people to come out and participate in the Fahrenheit marathon as possible - to get them reading Bradbury's novel, and to get them reading, period."

Thanks, Mark, for all the detail on this event.

For more information, visit the Edge Ensemble website.

Big Read - the Bronx!

The writer Jason Marchi tells me that on 28 April 2013 he will be giving a lecture in the Bronx, New York, about being mentored by Ray Bradbury, and their close friendship over the last 12 years of Bradbury's life. It's one of the many events being held in the Bronx, which has adopted Fahrenheit 451 for its community Big Read programme. The full programme of events can be seen here.

Other US cities have also adopted Fahrenheit 451, which continues to be a popular book in this scheme. Find out where else has chosen Bradbury using this interactive map.

A Night At The Opera

The question I am most often asked (apart from "What's the title of that story where the summer only lasts a single day?") is: "Do you like everything Bradbury did?"

The answer is quite simple: No.

While it's true that I tend to use this blog to focus on positive stories about Bradbury and his work, there's plenty that I don't like. But I just don't see the point in wasting my energy on things that don't interest me. So you won't very often hear me discuss Bradbury's later short story collections, which contain some very slight stories (or should I say "stories"). And you won't hear much from me about Let's All Kill Constance, the weaker of Ray's three mystery novels.

And you won't hear much about... operas or musicals.

Bradbury had a fascination for these forms of theatre, and devoted quite a bit of time from the 1960s onwards to developing all sorts of things for the musical stage: Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, Leviathan '99 and more. I haven't seen a single one of these performed, mainly because they were staged only briefly, and on a whole 'nother continent. But even if they were staged just around the corner from me, I would tend to stay away for the simple reason that I can't stand musicals!

The only exceptions I make are: cartoon musicals, and musicals involving puppets. But even these can try my patience.

Imagine my mixed feelings, then, when I learned that Daniel Levy and Elizabeth Margid had developed a new opera based on Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

The website for the project includes a substantial amount of the text and music for the show, some of it placed alongside Bradbury's original text, and I actually quite like being able to sample sections of the production in audio and/or video and/or text. I suppose it allows me to take it in small doses, whereas I would never be able to sit through an entire opera.

As a book, The Martian Chronicles does have a lot of musical content. The first time that Earth people "appear" to the Martians is through a song which Ylla hears in her head. Then comes a Martian opera, where the singer loses control and finds herself channeling a strange alien language. And when the Earthmen of the third expedition arrive on a Mars that resembles a small American town, they are greeted by the sound of Beautiful Ohio. There is clearly a lot of potential here for musical interpretation, and I would hope that this is reflected in the new opera.

Levy and Margid should be congratulated for managing to interest this opera skeptic. But I wish they would change the awful "sci-fi" label on the splash page of their website. Bradbury himself fought against labelling The Martian Chronicles as any kind of science fiction, let alone the downmarket kind suggested by the term "sci-fi".

Bradbury and the Group

For many years, a group of Los Angeles-area writers got together for mutual support and to review each other's works in progress. Ray Bradbury was one of them.

What I didn't know is that the core of the group was established as far back as 1948, with the publication of Best American Short Stories 1948. Apparently some enterprising soul went through the book, found out which of its authors lived within easy distance of LA, and invited them to join the group.

Terry Sanders' 1963 documentary Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer includes a short sequence showing the group reviewing Bradbury's "Dial Double Zero", although I'm not sure whether this reflects how the group really operated, or whether it is highly staged.

Now E.E.King has blogged about "the group", and reproduced a 1973 article by Bradbury's writer friend Sid Stebel, who Ray apparently described as "the best writing teacher that ever was!" The article is taken from the Los Angeles Times, Calendar section, 24 June 1973.

Play inspired by Ray Bradbury

Without Whom is a one-act play by R.J.Downes, inspired by Ray Bradbury and his wife Marguerite. It will shortly be seen in a new production at the Springworks Indie Theatre & Arts Festival at Stratford, Ontario.

"This play is not a biographical work," says its author, "but rather a fantastic tale with veiled elements of [Bradbury's] life and my own".

Downes first put on the one-act play in 2008, when Ray Bradbury was still alive, but Maggie Bradbury had passed away. It was Maggie's passing that indirectly provided the trigger for Downes, who was inspired by Sam Weller's appreciation of Maggie published on the official Ray Bradbury website.

Downes says he was unable to find anything that Bradbury had himself written about his wife's passing, which made him think one of two things: "Either he is too self-absorbed to bother to say anything or her death hit him so hard that it actually silenced the man."

The latter would seem to be the truth, as in the introduction to The Cat's Pajamas (2004), Bradbury's first collection of short stories to be published after Maggie's death, he wrote:

During the last six weeks a strange and surprising thing has happened. My wife became ill in early November, wound up in the hospital, and passed away just before Thanksgiving. During her illness and in the time since, for the first time in seventy years my demon has lain quiet within me. My muse, my Maggie, was gone, and my demon did not know what to do.

As the days passed, and then the weeks, I began to wonder if I would ever write again; I was unaccustomed to waking in the morning and not having my private theater acting out its ideas inside my head.

Playwright Downes says that "the play was my attempt to fill that silence. The marriage depicted in the play is a guess at best." His Ray and Maggie MONARCH spend forty years bickering, but Downes says "the bickering and fighting [...] is actually based on the relationship of my [ex-]girlfriend’s father and his third wife (who incidentally and quite ironically are also named Ray and Maggie)."

Ray Monarch is described as "a stubborn and opinionated man. Very smart in many ways but lacking in the emotional side of things. Having lost his wife (both his life partner and his sparring partner) he now finds himself at a loss for how to move forward."

Maggie Monarch is "a strong willed and independent mature woman who has lived a life she is proud of, caring for the man she loved in both the good times and the bad."

Ray and Maggie have a daughter,  Susan Monarch. Ray's agent is Harlan, whose "personal stake in his client requires him to worry about the fact that Ray seems more and more lost with each passing day."

Quotes from R.J. Downes are from 2008 when he talked about the first version of his play in this interview for Weird Tales. The character biographies and casting call for his new production are here. News about the staging of the new production can also be found here.

The photos of the real Maggie Bradbury that inspired R.J. Downes.

2013 Oscars Ceremony: Ray Bradbury in memoriam

Last night's Oscars ceremony had its usual in memoriam section,

which included a brief quotation from Ray Bradbury.

"The ability to fantasize is the ability to grow."

Bradbury News

Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that Ray Bradbury's books are finally to be released as e-books in the UK. No big deal, you might think - except that Bradbury was famously opposed to his works being made available in this form right up until his final year on this planet. I don't believe there was any great earth-shattering moment when he "caved in", or when he had some great epiphany; I think it was just a case of the new contract arriving, and the continued publication of the print editions of his works would be conditional on e-book rights also being made available to his publisher.

The Guardian faithfully reported this story, but slipped in a new piece of information which to me is much more significant. It appears that Dark Carnival is among the books which will be made available as an e-book.

Dark Carnival. Bradbury's first book. Not science fiction, but dark fantasy and horror. The book that he refused to be re-issued, on the grounds that he had re-written (improved?) all of its constituent short stories, which continued to be available in the collection The October Country.

Dark Carnival has only ever been available in three editions: the US hardcover, out of print since the 1940s; the UK hardcover, also out of print since that decade; and a limited edition re-issue from Gauntlett Press (2001), also long out of print.

At the moment, any copy of Dark Carnival is likely to set you back at least £600 (900 USD). The first edition typically goes for 2000USD.

So issuing Dark Carnival as an e-book is a very big deal. (Assuming, of course, that they use the original text from Dark Carnival. If they instead cobble the contents together from the text in The October Country, thinking that the stories are identical, they will be making a big mistake.)

Is there much of a difference between the stories in Dark Carnival and the re-written versions in The October Country? In some cases, not so much. But in other cases the stories are somewhat transformed. In general, the earlier versions of the stories are darker and a bit more raw; the re-writes are a bit more poetic, but sometimes read like a more "respectable" Bradbury has gone back and tidied up the work of his earlier self. This isn't far from what actually happened, as Dark Carnival came out when Bradbury was known only from stories in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, but The October Country was assembled when he had gone up in the world and was appearing in slick, upmarket magazines.



Speaking of Dark Carnival, BBC Radio 4 Extra this week broadcast a dramatisation of one of the stories from that book. "The Emissary" is a thirty-minute drama broadcast in the Haunted strand. Although marked on the BBC website as a "Radio 4 Extra debut", the closing credits of the show place it as a BBC World Service production, so it is probably not new... but I haven't been able to work out when it was made. Oddly, the late Percy Edwards is credited with playing the dog in the story, but he died a long time ago. Either it's a much older recording than it appears, or Percy is being played in as a sound effect!

"The Emissary" is still available right now for listening online, but it won't stay there forever. Get it while you can.

Tributes to RB

There's a couple of free events next weekend (23 Feb 2013), one in Glendale, California, and the other in Indianapolis, Indiana:

Glendale's Mystery and Imagination bookshop, where Bradbury used to have his public birthday parties, is hosting readings by members of Bradbury's own theatre company. Here are the details:

Meanwhile in Indy, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies' director Jon Eller will be speaking about Bradbury at the Irvington branch of the Indianapolis Public Library.

Details of the event are here.

Ray Bradbury Square

Ray Bradbury Square, recently dedicated in Los Angeles, is now marked up on Google Maps.

Here's a screen grab (click to make bigger)... and here's a live link to it on Google Maps.

This means that it can now be found by doing a Google Maps search. My thanks to jkt and Steven Paul Leiva for making this happen.