The Bradbury Chronicles (38 page)

 

O
VER THE
years, many attempts had been made to bring
The Martian Chronicles
to the screen. Director Fritz Lang had expressed interest; John Huston had once stated in no uncertain terms that he wanted to turn the science fiction classic into a motion picture, although ultimately Huston decided against it, following his experiences with Ray on
Moby Dick
. In 1953, writer Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe approached Ray about making a musical-theater version of
The Martian Chronicles
. “They wined me and dined me and danced me,” said Ray, “and took me out to fancy restaurants, and I finally said, ‘No, I don't think it would make a good stage musical.' They left and nothing ever happened to them except
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
!” For several months in 1957, Ray had met regularly with producer David Susskind, who also wanted to make a musical of
The Martian Chronicles
. Susskind envisioned a musical comedy; Ray's interest was piqued this time. But he told Susskind he wanted something darker, more operatic, in the tradition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
Carousel
. In the end, the two men were unable to see eye to eye and parted company.

Finally, in 1980,
The Martian Chronicles
was brought to television. The much-anticipated NBC miniseries adaptation of
The Martian Chronicles
aired in three consecutive nightly installments on January 27, 28, and 29. The television movie featured an ensemble cast, including actors Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowall, and Darren McGavin. Richard Matheson, the noted science fiction and fantasy author, screenwriter, and contributor to the original
Twilight Zone
television series, wrote the script for the miniseries. As was the case with so many of his media adaptations, Ray had nothing to do with its production.

The first time Ray saw the miniseries was at a preview the year before at the NBC studio in Burbank. Afterward, a press conference was held to promote several of the network's upcoming programs and specials. Ray sat next to boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who was also there to promote a program. When a reporter asked Ray what he thought of
The Martian Chronicles
miniseries, Ray summed up his reaction in one word, delivered with his typical to-hell-with-it honesty: “Boring.” Later, at a cocktail reception, the head of NBC, Fred Silverman, approached Ray and asked him if what he said about the miniseries was true.

“Haven't you seen it?” Ray asked the network chief.

Silverman admitted he hadn't.

“Well,” Ray continued, “you better see it because you've got a boring miniseries on your hands.” Ray had even told friends that his “idea of hell” was sitting through NBC's
The Martian Chronicles
. As a result of Ray's words, the network reconsidered the three-part series. “They shelved it for a few months,” Ray said. “They tinkered with it a little bit, but not much.” When the program finally aired, Ray and several friends and family members gathered at his house to watch it. Again his assessment of it was, “It was just boring.”

Two years later, in January 1982, NBC got it right. The network had hired Ray to write a teleplay for the series
NBC Peacock Theater
. The story the producers selected to adapt was “I Sing the Body Electric!” from the book of the same name. It was a story Ray had brought to the screen before, with results he didn't care for, in a 1962 episode of
The Twilight Zone
. This time, Ray was overjoyed with the adaptation of his script. The episode was given the more television-friendly title “The Electric Grandmother,” and it starred Maureen Stapleton as a robotic grandmother called into service to assist a family who is grieving the death of their mother. It was a tender story that belied the widespread impression that Ray Bradbury only wrote antitechnology tales. “It was a beautiful adaptation,” Ray said. “It was very touching.” Later that year “The Electric Grandmother” was nominated for an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Children's Production.”

In October 1982, Ray traveled to Orlando, Florida, for the opening of EPCOT Center. He took the train, of course. From the start, his voyage was a traveler's nightmare. Ray first stopped in New Orleans to give a lecture at a local college. While there, he learned that he couldn't get continuing rail service to Orlando, and so he hired a limousine driver to take him on the five-hundred-mile trek. The driver was a courtly southern African-American gentleman in his midseventies with whom Ray enjoyed talking as they headed across swamp and 'gator country toward the city that Disney had built.

Somewhere outside of Tallahassee, Florida, the limousine blew a tire. “We're out on the highway,” said Ray, “repairing a ruptured tire, with cars going by us at eighty miles an hour. Of course, the spare was no good, and could just barely run on a rim of rubber.” So Ray and the driver went to buy a new spare. “It took us two hours to find one going all around Tallahassee,” Ray recalled. “All the while, God was whispering to me, ‘Fly, dummy! Fly!'”

A hundred and fifty miles farther down the Florida interstate, the limousine engine blew. “The limousine was going to hell!” Ray said. The old car drifted off the highway, coasting slower and slower, finally lurching into the parking lot of a Howard Johnson motor lodge. Ray and the old driver both got rooms and called it a day. The next morning, Ray called a taxi company to take him the remaining distance to Orlando. “Smokey and the Bandit showed up,” said Ray, referencing the 1977 film starring Burt Reynolds and Jackie Gleason. When the taxi rolled up, Ray noted that the driver was a dead ringer for Gleason. To top it all off, Ray learned that the driver was the town sheriff, who moonlighted as the town cabbie. The sheriff-cabbie drove Ray the remaining distance to Orlando, pontificating the entire way, acting as tour director, pointing out various Sunshine State sights. “The taxi trip must have cost me two hundred dollars,” said Ray. “But it was a great trip because he was a great guy.”

Ray's twenty-seven-year-old daughter Bettina joined her father for the grand opening of EPCOT, a three-day, multimillion-dollar extravaganza. Unlike her father, however, Bettina flew from Los Angeles to Florida for the gala event. One evening, as father and daughter were strolling through the park's World Showcase—a series of re-created international streets and buildings—it stormed. Ray recalled with awe that the EPCOT staff appeared almost instantaneously with complimentary umbrellas for the thousands of guests. “We marched down the streets of Paris and Rome like a parade of
parapluies,
” remembered Bettina.

While at the opening of EPCOT, Ray appeared as a guest on the
Larry King
television show. He was interviewed from the lobby of the Contemporary Hotel as a large crowd of bystanders assembled. Bettina looked on with pride, thinking, “Two amazing visionaries who created amazing tomorrows by looking backward—Walt Disney and Ray Bradbury. If you only have two heroes in your life, you could do a lot worse.”

On the last night of their visit, as fireworks exploded in the sky over EPCOT, Ray thought of the 1939 World's Fair, when he had looked up at the sky with tears in his eyes, realizing that World War Two was inevitable. This time, at age sixty-two, Ray watched the fireworks with tears of joy in his eyes, thrilled to have helped Walt Disney's vision of a never-ending world's fair become a reality.

When the EPCOT celebration was over and it was time to go home, Ray's travel woes worsened. There was still no direct rail service from Orlando to Los Angeles; he would have to travel through Washington, D.C., to get to California. “I went to the Disney people and told them that I had a little problem. I think God's been whispering to me for two days now. ‘Fly, dummy! Fly!'” It was time to confront and overcome his fear of flying; and so Ray made a monumental decision and asked the Disney people to book him on a flight.

To survive his first flight, Ray decided he needed to get liquored up. So, before boarding, he drank three double martinis and “they poured me on a Delta airliner,” said Ray. The occasion was important enough that
Time
magazine sent a photographer to snap the Martian Chronicler taking his first flight. In the photo, Ray, white-haired, in suit and tie, is gritting his teeth and gripping his armrests.

“I took my first flight and I didn't panic,” he confessed. “I discovered that I wasn't afraid of flying, I was afraid of me. I was afraid that I would run up and down the aisles screaming for them to stop the plane.” When that didn't happen, Ray's fear of flying abated and he began flying regularly from then on. In fact, he and Maggie began making annual trips to their beloved second home, Paris, on the Concorde. And he was able to accept more and distant lecture invitations.

 

O
NE OF
Ray's long-held dreams was to see
Something Wicked This Way Comes
adapted for the big screen. In 1982, Disney purchased the film rights to the book. This was just the latest chapter in a long saga—the tortuous trip from page to screen.

It began in 1950. A knock came at the door of Ray and Maggie's tiny apartment. Thirty-year-old Ray opened the door to find an even younger man, a USC film student, calling. The young man's name was Sam Peckinpah, and he was an aspiring director. He was also a huge Ray Bradbury fan, and had come by simply to meet Ray. The two chatted briefly, both unaware that their career paths would cross two decades later.

In 1955, Ray wrote a screenplay of
Something Wicked This Way Comes
for Gene Kelly, but that project was shelved when no backing could be found. Then, in 1971, Peckinpah, now a renowned director (most notably for his paean to the waning days of the American West, 1969's
The Wild Bunch
), approached Ray again, this time about adapting
Something Wicked This Way Comes
. While Ray felt that the director's work was strikingly violent, he was convinced of his talent and was enthusiastic about the idea of working with Peckinpah.

“I asked Sam,” recalled Ray, “‘How would you make the film?'”

“Take the book and shove the pages into the camera,” Peckinpah replied. And that was all Ray Bradbury needed to hear.

“If you look at the average page of any of my novels or short stories,” said Ray, “it's a shooting script. You can shoot the paragraphs—the close-ups, the long shots, what have you. This has to do with my background and seeing films and collecting comic strips, because Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan—those are all storyboards for films, aren't they?”

Ray and Peckinpah had several meetings about the project as Peckinpah sought financial backing for the picture. The director, as Ray recalled, was a heavy drinker, and when he was drunk he was lovable and charming. At their meetings, usually happy-hour gatherings during which Peckinpah would pour gin in Ray's beer to keep him on equally inebriated footing, the two men had a grand time. But Peckinpah took months seeking funding, which he ultimately never found. Because it was taking so long, Ray believed that Peckinpah was “dragging his feet,” and that the director was not truly committed to the project. As a gesture of his confidence and desire to work with Peckinpah, Ray offered to sell him the option rights to the novel for one dollar. But Peckinpah wouldn't take it.

Finally, in 1977, Ray turned to Paramount, selling the studio the rights to
Something Wicked This Way Comes
. Ray would be writing the script.

That week, as word about the sale of the novel made the rounds, a delivery arrived at the front door of the Bradburys' Cheviot Hills home: a small, spiky cactus and a jar of Vaseline. Attached was a note from Sam Peckinpah. Ray recalled the message: “It said, ‘Cut this cactus in three parts—one for you, one for your director, and one for your producer. And use the Vaseline as directed.'” Ray was bewildered; he believed that Peckinpah had been afforded more than enough time to secure financial backing for a production. “When he had a few drinks in him,” said Ray, “Sam loved me. Then, when he was sober, he wasn't interested.” But the cactus amused Ray, so he placed it on the front porch until Maggie finally threw it out a year later.

The saga of
Something Wicked This Way Comes
didn't end with the sale of the novel rights to Paramount. Jack Clayton was the producer on the project. Ray had known Clayton since working with him on
Moby Dick
from 1953 to 1954, when Clayton had served as associate producer on the film (he had also served in this capacity on the 1952 Huston film,
Moulin Rouge,
as well as on Huston's 1953 picture,
Beat the Devil
). Despite the turmoil between Ray and Huston throughout the making of
Moby Dick,
Ray had always liked and admired Jack Clayton. Since then, Clayton had become a respected director in his own right, with the 1974 adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic
The Great Gatsby,
starring Robert Redford in the title role. The film was a favorite of Ray's and Maggie's. “It was a beautiful film,” raved Maggie. “We saw it several times over the years on television.”