CONVERSATION WITH RAY BRADBURY: Legendary ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Author an Optimist Despite Foreboding Visions
“I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”
― Ray Bradbury, “Dandelion Wine”
By Gregory N. Joseph
“I AM A COWARD,” Ray Bradbury was saying with a full-throated laugh.
Hardly.
Despite his refusal to fly (even astronaut John Glenn could not coax him into a short flight), drive (the result of having witnessed a horrific automobile accident at the age of 15) or watch the 6 p.m. news (he found it too sensationalized), the man The New York Times called “the writer most responsible for bringing the modern science fiction into the literary mainstream” was far from that.
Nor, remarkably enough, was Bradbury — whose iconic writing frightened, shocked and terrified generations spanning the 20th and 21st centuries in works like “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man” and “I Sing the Body Electric” — a pessimist.
Even at the darkest moment of any yarn he would spin a thread of humor. It was a deliberate style.
“Comedy is the greatest form of writing that there is,” he explained. “In that, you take all the things that you know about existence and you top it. You say, given these facts of all these horrible things, I choose to laugh, to turn it inside out.”
Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. By the time of his passing on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, he had written 27 novels and 600 short stories that were read by an estimated eight million readers in 36 languages. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery fiction, and more.
Bradbury’s family moved from Waukegan to Tucson, Arizona, and back again as his father, a power and telephone lineman, sought work. They eventually settled in Los Angeles when Bradbury was 14 years old.
Young Bradbury, whose middle name was taken from silent film swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, fell in love with Hollywood and the movies. Indeed, the Bradbury brood resided just a few blocks from the Fox Uptown Theatre on Los Angeles’ Western Avenue, which had ties to MGM and Fox, and there the teen stuffed his eyes with as many movies as he could. He also spent days on end in front of Paramount and Columbia studios, and even made his way over to the Brown Derby restaurant, where famous film folk dined. A student at Los Angeles High School, he joined the drama club there, further feeding his interest in the performing arts.
It should come as no surprise, then, that eventually the movies-smitten youngster would eventually meet stars like Norma Shearer, Ronald Colman and Laurel and Hardy, often gaining their autographs, and also encountered the likes of movie special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen.
Bradbury’s first pay as a writer, at 14, in fact, was for a joke he sold to George Burns, whom he had met during one of his celebrity pursuits. The beloved comedian used the gag on his immensely popular “Burns and Allen” radio show.
All the while, Bradbury also was feeding his infatuation with reading and writing, which had begun in Waukegan as a child when an aunt read to him.
His early focus included the works of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Bradbury told me that great influences on him were Poe and the 19th century English novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins, as well as the “Oz” books and Buck Rogers stories. Especially the latter.)
Bradbury soon discovered and joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Later his interest in literature broadened and included poetry by Alexander Pope and John Donne. As a young adult, he read “Astounding Science Fiction and Fact” magazine articles by Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and others.
Not surprisingly, given his love of movies, Bradbury eventually dipped his fertile imagination into motion pictures, including consulting on the 1956 film adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” starring Gregory Peck, and supplying the story for the 1953 cult horror classic “It Came From Outer Space,” which was nominated by the American Film Institute as one of the top ten science fiction movies of all time.
His own writing, in fact, has been adapted for numerous films and television shows.
Many considered Bradbury much more than a science fiction writer (a title that he himself in fact eschewed), but one of our great futurists. Of what lies ahead, he said simply: “We — the people — make the trends of the future.”
He believed that he had seen the future, and that it would welcome mankind, and he bristled at any suggestion that it would be cramped, cold and colorless.
“There are millions of acres of unfilled land in this country,” he said when we spoke in March of 1986. “Most of the people are gathered along the coasts of the United States, and in seven or eight cities — then there is land. There’s no excuse for us to be cramped.”
Sixty-five years old when I sat down with him for a profile in San Diego, where he had dropped by to look over an exhibit of push-button, electronic furniture “of tomorrow,” and to deliver a lecture at a local college, Bradbury said he also served as an “around the edges” consultant on San Diego’s flashy downtown Horton Plaza shopping district and had been similarly involved in other developments around the United States. “It has to do with the needs and habits of the people,” he said of those endeavors.
“Another cliché is that the future will be antiseptic,” he continued. “It doesn’t have to be. Most architecture in America is dreadful stuff and has been for years. Having all these black buildings going up in California is stupid, with its Mediterranean climate. At least in San Diego you’ve celebrated the California tradition in Balboa Park and the Spanish architecture from Barcelona and Madrid.
“People down south of Los Angeles do better in this regard. Newport has some handsome development. It has a lot of trees and the colors are better. The same can be said of La Jolla.
“A lot depends on the developer … we’re going to rebuild all of our cities and small towns in this country in the next 15 years.”
But he offered a caveat about big-city development: “It takes time to do things in a democracy — it takes forever.”
Bradbury — who once had been a member of a mayoral board on rapid transit in Los Angeles — preferred monorails to a subway in the City of Angels. As we spoke about that, Walt Disney’s name crept into the conversation.
The story goes that Bradbury met Disney in 1963, when they almost quite literally bumped into each other at Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles. Bradbury noticed “a man passed by with so many gifts he couldn’t seem to hold them all. And then I saw it was Walt Disney!” He introduced himself and suggested lunch sometime. Disney instead invited him to his office at his studio, and what Bradbury described as a “quiet friendship” developed.
At Disney’s request, Bradbury later provided an outline for the Epcot Center’s central Spaceship Earth building at Walt Disney World in Florida. His last film project before our conversation, in fact, was for Disney Studios — “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”
“The reason we’re rebuilding our cities is Disney,” Bradbury contended. “His legacy is incredible. They were influenced by Disney on San Diego’s Horton Plaza. I am. We’re all children of Disney.”
Bradbury believed at the time that the U.S. space program should continue despite the then-recent Challenger space shuttle disaster, which he looked upon as an incident not unlike one that might have befallen pioneers exploring any frontier.
He refused to be critical of NASA. “Private enterprise couldn’t have pulled off our space program,” he said.
Ironically, Bradbury, who had written about the colonization of Mars, traversing the cosmos and space aliens, said he couldn’t stand to fly. He admitted that he had only flown “two or three times” and had no desire to do so ever again. Even an admittedly pleasant whale-watching voyage on the Goodyear blimp failed to change his mind.
Rather, Bradbury was content to take flights of the imagination instead, each morning producing between eight and ten pages of whatever form he was involved in at the time, from poetry to screenplays, an incredibly eclectic array of the written word. When asked if that volume of production pertained to any particular genre, he quipped, “Take your pick.”
During our talk, he outlined a host of projects he said were coming up, including an opera someone wanted to do based on his novel “Fahrenheit 451,” scripts for a revival of Rod Serling’s classic “Twilight Zone” TV series, and promotions of his latest novel, “Death Is a Lonely Business.” Director Steven Spielberg also was trying to lure him to his own TV fantasy anthology series, “Amazing Stories.”
On Aug. 22, 2012 — what would have been Bradbury’s 92nd birthday — NASA announced that the point where its rover Curiosity landed on Mars had been named in honor of the writer. The Curiosity team tweeted: “In tribute, I dedicate my landing spot on Mars to you, Ray Bradbury. Greetings from Bradbury Landing!”
“The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him,” Bradbury wrote in “Dandelion Wine,” the 1957 novel drawn from his own childhood.
The world, and the worlds well beyond the one that we now inhabit, stared back at Ray Bradbury, and liked what they saw.
