At Truthdig, Steve Wasserman laments the apparent just-around-the-corner demise of both literary criticism and literature itself during a q&a with Ray Bradbury.
In addition to his many novels and short stories, Bradbury wrote a handful of screenplays, including a 1956 adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which John Huston directed in 1956, with Gregory Peck (!) as Captain Ahab. The film version turned out to be a daring but ultimately unsatisfying effort. (According to Bradbury, Huston asked him to write the screenplay "because I love dinosaurs.")
Bradbury also wrote the story for the 1953 sci-fi flick It Came from Outer Space, while a number of films and television productions were based on his novels and short stories, including The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Illustrated Man (1969), The Picasso Summer (1969), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), which Bradbury himself adapted for the screen.
More recently, one of Bradbury’s novels inspired Michael Moore’s title for his anti-George W. Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Fahrenheit 451 (1966), probably the best-known film adaptation of a Bradbury work, was directed by François Truffaut, and starred Oskar Werner (above, blindly obeying orders as a — quite literally — fireman; of the type that burns books) and Julie Christie. Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard penned the adaptation.
I’m assuming that Bradbury didn’t foresee a future in which totalitarian governments wouldn’t need to resort to book burning to keep the masses in check — simply because people, in a perennial state of blissful ignorance, wouldn’t bother reading them, anyway.
Below is a snippet from the Wasserman-Bradbury interview:
Wasserman: As you’ve lived the literary culture of Los Angeles and have been one of its defining personalities — as you look back over these five or six or more decades in which you’ve been, you know, part of the very fabric of Los Angeles literary culture, what’s changed most dramatically for you, either for good or for bad?
Bradbury: Well, we don’t have the authors here that we used to have. Sixty years ago, all the major science fiction authors lived in the L.A. area, and Robert Heinlein became my friend and my teacher, and he sold my first short story for me. It went into Script Magazine. And all the other writers became my friends. Leigh Brackett was a leading science fiction writer. I used to meet her every Sunday down in Muscle Beach, and she read my terrible stories and I read her good ones. So over a period of five years of going to Muscle Beach and meeting my favorite writer, I became a writer. But that environment is no longer here. Those writers don’t exist anymore.
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