Unchanged Habits

The Ventura Country Reporter has just published a new interview with Bradbury, which shows his writing habits to be unchanged, despite his eighty-eight years. Mind you, you can't believe everything you read: this article claims that Bradbury still travels the world giving lectures. Not quite. He doesn't venture beyond Southern California these days, because of his health. Anyway, read the interview here.

Update: the New York Times features a similar (but better written, more quirky, more fun) article in its 19th June issue. I am told this was a page one story!




Here's a nice idea - and one I have used with my own Video & Film Production students on occasion: making a trailer for a book!

Digital Book Talk is a literacy scheme from the University of Central Florida. It has synopses and film trailers for lots of books. One such is this neat trailer for Fahrenheit 451, and another for The Martian Chronicles.




The Steve Canyon volume 2 DVD is now on release. This is the second collection of episodes from an old TV series. The significance for the Bradbury fan is that this volume includes the episode that Bradbury scripted, a Christmas tale called "The Gift".

Reviews of the DVD can be found at DVD Talk and Comic Mix.

Miscellaneous

From the "right up my alley department": news of a new radio drama series on US public radio, which will begin with a dramatisation of Bradbury's story "It Burns Me Up". This is a tale from Bradbury's murder-mystery short story collection A Memory of Murder, the story told from the point-of-view of a corpse!

Details of the series are here.

Found in the blogosphere: Bradbury is a regionalist: an interesting blog post on why Bradbury can be seen not as an American writer, but as an Illinois writer.

...and some interesting observations on Fahrenheit 451 from this "e-zine for teens".

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.

Bradbury news

Author Alice Hoffman - writer of Practical Magic and The Story Sisters, among others - has written a short piece for NPR about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. "I owe Ray Bradbury a huge debt, one that can never be repaid," she says. Read the article here (I originally linked here, but this link seems to have died.)



California Artists Radio Theatre has updated its website with some photos of the recent performance of Leviathan '99. The production was recorded for future release by CART. See photos of the cast - including William Shatner, Sean Astin, Norman Lloyd, Samantha Eggar, Walter Koenig - with Bradbury and the legendary radio producer Norman Corwin here.

Bradbury in...Bulgaria!

Bradbury's work is often written about it the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK. But he has a wide readership throughout the world. A remarkable insight into how Bradbury is perceived in Russia can be gleaned from friend Pavel's website, www.raybradbury.ru. I don't read Russian, but just clicking around the links is interesting, and if you have the patience to use an internet translation service, you can read some of the site in sort-of English.

Until today, I knew nothing of Bradbury's reception in Bulgaria. It hadn't even occurred to me that Bradbury would be known in that country. But Young Jedi's Holocron has this fascinating account of Bradbury's critical reception in that country, complete with cold-war era distortions of fact, such as the time that Bradbury's house was burned to the ground. (Don't worry, never happened. But someone in Bulgaria thought it did. Apparently.)

F451 Graphic Novel

News on a new graphic adaptation of Fahrenheit 451: artist Tim Hamilton has, with Bradbury's approval, been preparing this new version which will get its debut in Playboy, of all places. This isn't such a bizarre place, though; Bradbury's original book-burning tale first saw print in Hefner's adult magazine, as the short story "The Fireman".

Read about the publishing plans in this Publishers Weekly story, and read more in this profile of Tim Hamilton.

F451 Comes Alive

Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 continues to be a popular choice for theatrical staging. News reaches me of a current production in Goshen, Indiana. Ticketing information is here.

The SouthBend Tribune has a behind-the-scenes article here.

And here's a video clip:




Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Manifest Urban Arts Festival is bringing Bradbury's characters to life. Learn more here - or by watching this video clip:

More F451

It's been a good five years since the picture on the left was taken. It shows a meeting between Ray Bradbury and screenwriter-director Frank Darabont, when Darabont was delivering his screenplay for the proposed new film of Fahrenheit 451.

The wheels turn slowly in Hollywood, if they turn at all. IMDB stills lists Fahrenheit 451 as in development for 2010. The last news that came my way was a year ago, when Darabont announced with regret that he was looking for a leading man for the project, to replace Tom Hanks.

If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, the Mystery Man On Film blog has recently posted an excellent article about Bradbury's original novel, Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation, and Darabont's as yet unfilmed screenplay. Read it here.

I have some pages of my own on various incarnations of Fahrenheit 451: you can read about the origin of the book here, and Bradbury's own stage play adaptation (British premiere) here.

Meryl Streep reads F451!

Coming up later this month is a new initiative in New York, called Project 451. Designed to promote literacy, it's being launched at the 2009 Literature to Life Awards. Find out more at the event website and at the Project 451 website. Who thought we would ever watch Meryl Streep read from Ray Bradbury? Here she is:

Pick up a penguin...

Despite his long publishing history, only one of Ray Bradbury's titles has ever been released through Penguin, the distinguished British paperback imprint. That one title is The Day It Rained Forever, which is a variant of the US book A Medicine for Melancholy.

This is one of many Penguin SF titles documented in a new website devoted to the art of Penguin SF, put together by James Pardey. It looks an excellent resource, and I have already spent a few hours rambling through the contents.

The Day It Rained Forever is covered here - but don't limit yourself to just this one book!