Bradbury 100 - new episode - with David Loftus

Time for another new episodes of Bradbury 100 - and joining me this week is writer and actor David Loftus.

David has read the works of Ray Bradbury a lot. Aloud.

Yes, aloud!

In the podcast, he explains how he came to read Something Wicked This Way Comes out loud multiple times!

David also once wrote an appreciation of Something Wicked for the now-defunct Bookdrum website. Although Bookdrum is no longer with us, an archived version of the site survives on the Internet Archive, and so you can still find David's composition, preserved for the ages, at this link.

There is plenty more of David's writing on his Patreon page, here.

In the introduction to this podcast episode, I talk about Ray Bradbury's own audiobook readings of his works. Some of these are still commercially available (and many of them are available without permission on various website...). You can find a fairly detailed listing of these audiobooks on one of the oldest pages on my website, right here.

And now, enjoy the podcast!

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 23 - with actor/writer David Loftus

 

 

 

 

Bradbury 100 - LIVE!

As we approach Ray Bradbury's one-hundred-and-first birthday, I thought we should celebrate! And so I'm staging another LIVE episode of Bradbury 100 on 21st August 2021 (from 4pm-5pm UK time).

You may recall that the first Bradbury 100 - LIVE was back in September last year. I ran a Zoom meeting and invited people to "call in", and then livestreamed the meeting to Facebook.

Well, nearly a year on, let's do the same again. One difference, though: this time I'll be joined via Zoom by Steven Paul Leiva. Steven was the very first guest on the Bradbury 100 podcast, and had some great stories to tell about his times of working with Ray Bradbury. Steve was also the driving force between the city of Los Angeles' official declaration of "Ray Bradbury Week" back in 2010, and a whole series of events that accompanied that declaration.

If you'd like to take part in the show - ask a question, tell us about your experience of Ray, or tell us which Bradbury item you'd take to the mythical desert island - you will be able to join in via Zoom. I'll post the link to the Zoom meeting nearer to the time.

But if you just want to sit back and watch, you'll be able to watch the livestream on Facebook, in the "Ray Bradbury Fan Club" group. (I'll also post a copy of the video here on Bradburymedia, after the event; and there will be an edited, audio-only version of the show in the normal Bradbury 100 podcast feed.

Here's the link to the Facebook event. More details will be added as 21st August approaches!

https://www.facebook.com/events/2884945031759983

Bradbury 100 - new episode

Time for another all-new episode of my audio podcast Bradbury 100. This week I'm joined by filmmaker and visual effects artist Christopher Cooksey to discuss the challenges and joys of bringing Ray's work to life in the visual realm.

Christopher is the co-producer of Bill Oberst Jr's stage production Ray Bradbury - LIVE (Forever). Ostensibly a one-person show, it's really a visual feast. Bill, alone on stage (except for one dance scene), is nevertheless able to walk around Bradbury's world with the aid of visual projections and audio effects. This video, from Christopher's Youtube channel, shows some of the work that went into making the visuals for the show.

 

 

To put Bill and Christopher's work in context, in the first part of the podcast I talk about Bradbury's own use of audio-visual elements in his stage plays. You can find Ray's plays in print in a number of books. Dramatic Publishing carries nearly all of them for would-be performers and play producers, and there are some play collections aimed at general readers. The introductions and production notes in these are often as entertaining as the plays.

Find out more about Christopher Cooksey from his extensive Youtube channel and from his website.

And now, enjoy the episode:

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 22 - with film-maker Christopher Cooksey

Bradbury 100 - New Series!

As we approach 22 August, Ray Bradbury's birthday, we come to the end of Bradbury's centenary year. To mark the occasion and to close out the year, I have a new miniseries of Bradbury 100 podcast episodes!

Over the next few weeks, you can hear interviews with scholars, artists and performers who have all worked with Bradbury material. But we start the series with a super fan: Pavel Gubarev.

 

Pavel Gubarev with his shot story collection. And yes, that is Sigmund Freud on the cover...

 

Pavel's Russian website at www.raybradbury.ru is an extraordinary piece of work. It predates Bradburymedia by a good few years, and in its early days it was one of the best Bradbury websites even for non-Russian fans. In those days, it did have a fair bit of English-language content, although today it is largely monolingual.

Pavel is a fascinating guest. Not just a webmaster, he is also an award-winning author. And his unique experience of spending his formative years in the Soviet Union, and then in Russia, gives him great insight into Bradbury's popularity in Russia.

Pavel once created an English-language tribute to Bradbury on a website called Immersion. For this site he collaborated with fans from various countries to produce introductions to Bradbury's work. Although the site itself is no longer extant, a version of it can still be accessed via the Internet Archive.

In this episode of Bradbury 100 I talk about the arcane Soviet copyright system,  and mention a Mikhail Iossel article from the New Yorker.

You can find Bradbury 100 through your podcast app, or you can listen the latest episode below. I hope you enjoy it.

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 21 - with writer and webmaster Pavel Gubarev

New Bradbury 100 Episodes

Coming soon, to a podcast app near you:

A new mini-series of Bradbury 100 podcast episodes!

 I have several interviews "in the can", and will be dropping the episodes every weekend for the next few weeks. The first will appear on this blog tomorrow (Saturday 24h July 2021).

Look for it here, or on your podcast app.

The first interview guest of the series will be Pavel Gubarev, award-winning writer and creator of the remarkably popular Russian-language Ray Bradbury website.

The Screaming Woman on Blu-ray

In 1972, there was a TV movie based on Ray Bradbury's short story "The Screaming Woman". It was directed by Jack Smight, who had earlier directed another Bradbury-based film, The Illustrated Man (1969). The TV movie has been difficult to get hold of for years, although it keeps popping up on YouTube, probably illegally. But later this year, it receives an official home-media release, with a Blu-ray edition.

Bradbury's original story centres on a young girl, and when Bradbury later adapted it himself for The Ray Bradbury Theatre in the 1980s, the starring role went to a young Drew Barrymore. But the 1972 version - which Bradbury was not involved with - recasts the central role to an adult woman, with the legendary Olivia de Havilland taking that role. In fact, the TV movie sounds like something from an earlier age, since its other key cast members are Golden Age Hollywood stars Joseph Cotten and Walter Pidgeon.

It's a decent enough TV movie, and a reasonable expansion of the Bradbury story, given that it needs a lot more added plot to bring the Bradbury short up to feature length. It was shot on 35mm film, so should stand up well to a Blu-ray presentation. I have my fingers crossed that the release will be an untampered-with 4:3 scan, and not some misguided attempt to re-format it for modern 16:9 TVs.

The Blu-ray comes from Kino Lorber, who are renowned for bringing obscure classics back into the light. They promise a commentary from leading fantasy media writer Gary Gerani. It should be out in early October, so this might make a neat addition to your Bradbury Halloween screening roster...

Read more here: https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=28862

Moby Dick at Sixty-Five!

Sixty-five years ago today - 27th June 1956 - John Huston's film version of Moby Dick was released, with a screenplay co-written by Ray Bradbury. As regular readers of Bradburymedia will be aware, Ray's experience of working on this film cast a very long shadow.

Bradbury became somewhat obsessive over Herman Melville's story, and was driven to write his own prose version of Moby Dick in the form of Leviathan '99, which was initially a radio play, then a stage play and opera, and eventually a novella.

Bradbury's time in Ireland working on the script inspired him to write a number of Irish stories, initially as short plays and later as short stories. He later gathered up all of his Irish tales and laced them together with fictionalised recollections of his working with Huston, in the novel Green Shadows, White Whale.

Over the years, as I've researched the making of Moby Dick, I've blogged a number of times on different aspects of the film, so here's a selection of posts:

Bradbury's time in Ireland was really quite brief - less than a year - but he became very attached to the city of Dublin and its surroundings. Here's my attempt to follow in Bradbury's footsteps as I wandered around the Irish capital.

Bradbury left Ireland before the filming of Moby Dick began. As far as I know, he never saw any of the Irish locations used in the film. The small town of Youghal was one of the key locations, representing New Bedford in the film. In this post, I show how Youghal still shows distinct evidence of Moby Dick's presence.

Naturally, Moby Dick is full of symbolism of whales and fish. This simple post collects some of the key fishy moments from the film.

There has been some dispute over who exactly wrote what for the Moby Dick screenplay. Bradbury claimed to have written most of it, and fought against Huston's claim of half the screenplay credit. Rumours also circulate that Roald Dahl and others had a hand in the script (Dahl's own account says that he spent very little time on it, and didn't contribute a word). And Orson Welles - famed for re-writing any role he was asked to play - claimed to have written his own lines for the part of Father Mapple. In this post, I dig into Welles' lines and establish the truth of that particular claim.

Bradbury put a lot of detail into his script which Huston eventually removed or ignored. But in this post, I look at a detail which Huston kept, even modifying an existing building to accommodate it in the movie.

Finally, Ray Bradbury wasn't the only person to have a run-in with the larger-than-life Huston. In this post, I run through some of the other writers who fictionalised Huston or otherwise incorporated him into their recollections.

Bradbury's "Witch" Ancestor

It seems to be quite well known that Ray Bradbury's ancestry can be traced to back to Mary Perkins Bradbury, who was charged with witchcraft at Salem in 1692. Sam Weller's biography of Ray, The Bradbury Chronicles, gives a couple of pages to this, and it's referred to elsewhere. But did Ray know about this ancestry, and did he ever write about Mary?

The answer to both questions is a definite yes. In 1955, Stanley J. Kunitz published a first revision to Twentieth Centry Authors, and it includes an article on Bradbury written by Ray himself. This was Bradbury at the peak of his early fame as a writer. He had several books out, including his masterwork Fahrenheit 451 (1953), was writing for television, and had completed his arduous stint as the screenwriter of Moby Dick (which would be released in 1956). At the time of the article, he would have been grappling with his manuscript for Dandelion Wine (which would be published in 1957), while also working on a script treatment for Gene Kelly - The Dark Carnival, which would eventually emerge as the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).

The short article - you can see the whole thing below - refers to Bradbury's belief that writers shouldn't slant their work to a particular market, but should write freely and let the work find an an appropriate outlet. It also refers to his belief that science fiction and fantasy "offer the liveliest, freshest approaches" to the problems of the modern world.

And it refers to Mary Perkins Bradbury, to whom Bradbury attributes his belief in "freedom from fear [...] and thought control".

...for which we should, I suppose, say, "Thank you, Mary Perkins Bradbury."

(And my thanks to Hugh, whose question about Mary prompted me to write this post!)

You can find out more about Bradbury's ancestry in this (very old) blog post of mine. 

 

 

If you click on these images, they should embiggen.

Science Fiction 101

My other podcast, which I co-host with Colin Kuskie, is Science Fiction 101. It's a general SF show, with talk about books, short stories, films, TV and more. I even mention Ray Bradbury from time to time (try and stop me!)

In the latest episode, I put Colin on the spot with some fiendish quiz questions, we review two of the Nebula Award short stories, and give our usual run-through of what appeals to us in past, present or future science fiction.

You can pick us up via your podcast app - we're on all the major platforms, and quite a few minor ones. And you can listen via the website:

https://101sf.blogspot.com/2021/06/quizzers-revenge.html

Miscellany

Browsing around those interwebs I discovered a few bits of academic writing on Ray Bradbury which were new to me. Maybe they're new to you too!

In no particular order, here they are:

 

Christian Ylagan's The Heavens Beckon Us? Revisiting Constructions of Home and Identity in Ray Bradbury’sThe Martian Chronicles

Dostonjon Fayzullo o’gli Abulkhairov's The Development and Rise of American Short Fiction

Christopher Bundrick's “All we know is here we are”: Gothic Aspects of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles

Novita Dewi's Teaching Literature with Tough Topics in ELT Class: Bullying and Bigotry

Juan David Cruz-Duarte's Ray Bradbury on Race and Segregation: The Case of “Way in the Middle of the Air” and “The Other Foot”

José Roberto Saravia Vargas' Intertextuality in Bradbury’s “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine”: Is intertextuality contributing to the construction of meaning or resisting it?

Ilse Marie Bussing López' Architecture, Technology and the Uncanny: Infiltrating Space in “The Veldt” and in “The Digital House Project”

Hassan Abootalebi's The Omnipresence of Television and the Ascendancy of Surveillance/Sousveillance in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451