Here is part two of my feature profile of the late great Ray Bradbury, first published in 1985 and based on my interview and conversations with the Prometheus-winning author:
Bradbury’s playful spirit and suspenseful stories have endeared him to legions of fans.
Next fall (1986), over the Labor Day weekend, an estimated 6,000 fans will gather in Atlanta during the 44th annual World Science Fiction Convention to personally thank the sprightly 65-year-old man who has always remained a child at heart.
It’s about time, because Bradbury’s recognition as a Worldcon’s Guest of Honor was long overdue.
Considering Bradbury’s large body of work and vast appeal, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Bradbury owns the “B” in science fiction’s classic alphabet of first-rank authors. (For those not in the know, the “A” is owned by Isaac Asimov and the “C” by Arthur Clarke.)
Think of science fiction’s Golden Age, and one immediately thinks of the author of The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Halloween Tree, I Sing the Body Electric! and, his acknowledged masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451.
BRADBURY’S PROMETHEUS-WINNING FAHRENHEIT 451
Last year Bradbury’s masterpiece was inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame honoring outstanding fiction with civil liberties and individual rights themes.
Angry and upset by the book-burning tactics of the McCarthy era in the early 1950s, Bradbury got the idea for a cautionary fable about future dictatorship in which “firemen” start fires in books in order to stamp out dissenting ideas.
Energized by his sense of moral outrage at attempted censorship, Bradbury created Fahrenheit 451, whose title refers to the temperature at which books burn, in just nine frenzied days. Then he spent another two weeks revising it.
“I’m a sprinter,” Bradbury acknowledged.
“That’s the sort of person I am and the way I work. I don’t let my work own me. If it doesn’t behave, I turn my back on it.”
GOING TO THE MOVIES
Bradbury is always probing, as one of the stories about that glittery make-believe and might-have-been, Hollywood, illustrates.
“We’ve all had the same experience,” Bradbury said.
“You go to the movies. Halfway through the movie, you think you know what the ending is going to be, and then the damn fools go on with the film and come up with a dreadful ending… And you walk out of the theater disgruntled with these non-creative people.”
That happened to Bradbury about 10 years ago, when he saw Network for the first time.
Directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Peter Finch, William Holden and Faye Dunaway, Network is a delightful, cynical black comedy about the ratings war between the TV networks.
On a deeper level, the Oscar-winning film takes a subversive look at the media’s powerful influence on American society.
In the film, Finch played a network TV commentator who went “mad as hell” and became “the prophet of the airwaves.” His ratings skyrocketed.
But when Finch got too preachy about the evils of TV, his ratings plummeted again, prompting ratings-conscious network executives to have him assassinated.
“I sat there, holding on to my stomach, and wailing, ‘Oh No,” Bradbury recalled.
“They showed him lying on the TV studio floor, riddled with bullet holes, dead. And then it said: The End. Well, I’m sorry, that doesn’t make me th ink, when I walk out of the movie theater. It made me depressed.”
REIMAGINING ‘NETWORK’
So Bradbury recreated his own movie ending, “which was 10 times better.”
In his revised version of Network, later published in the Los Angeles Times, the movie doesn’t end with the assassination.
“If you’re going to kill the poor (man), then let everybody in the country know that you’re going to kill him on a certain night,” Bradbury suggested.
“And the ratings go up again, right?”
“After you kill him, two nights later you hold his funeral, televised with Walter Cronkite. And the ratings go up again.
“Then you go to Forest Lawn and you buy the most expensive tomb you could possibly buy and put his body in the tomb, and roll a large rock in front of it. You come back a week later, and roll the rock aside.
“The tomb is empty – and you’ve got a series.”
When Bradbury mailed his proposed ending to Lumet, Lumet wrote back: “Where were you when we needed you?”
An easy question to answer.
As usual, Bradbury was sitting at his typewriter.
He wasn’t worrying. He wasn’t “thinking.”
He was simply getting done what he’s always done best: writing imaginatively and playfully, about everything imaginable.
Read Part One of the Bradbury interview, reposted from its December 1985 publication in The Columbus Dispatch.
Note: This feature profile is based mostly on an extensive phone interview with Bradbury. Yet, it also incorporates conversations I had with him at the Future of Freedom Conference in 1985 in Southern California.
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