-
- RP – I can imagine.
What about the new production at the Fremont?
It’s opening June 22nd?
Ray
Bradbury – That’s right.
RP - How did that come about?
Ray
Bradbury – Well. Let me give you some background.
I’ve been in the theatre for 45 years now. I got introduced
to theatre because when I was in Ireland writing the screen play
for the film Moby Dick some of my friends wrote to me and asked,
“Are you going to write anything about Ireland?” I said I
didn’t think so because of time constraints – too busy with
Herman Melville and the whale and John Huston, but I was going to
theatres while I was there. I went to see the Abbey Players
and the Gate Theatre and I saw Siobhan McKenna in St. Joan, one of
the greatest plays ever by Bernard Shaw. She took it to
London after that, then New York and then she played in King of
Kings, the film. She played the mother of Jesus, Mary.
So I got to know a lot about the theatre in Ireland, but I didn’t
know if I would be writing plays – or anything about Ireland for
that matter, until I got home.
I had
been home about a year, and one night a voice spoke in my head, and
said “Ray darling –“
RP
- The voice in your head said Ray darling?
Called you darling?
Ray
Bradbury – Yes – I said to this voice, “Who is that?”
Then the voice said – “Remember you took that taxicab from
Dublin to Kilkock three times a week to see his honor and you saw
the fog and the mist – you remember all that Ray?’
Yes I do, I answered. “Would you mind putting it down?”
the voice said.
So I got out
of bed the next morning and wrote my first poem about Ireland – then I
wrote an essay – then I wrote a short story and within a year I wrote
three one-act plays about Ireland.
RP – So Ireland was a real
inspiration for you?
Ray
Bradbury – Yes. Then a friend of mine came up to me one
day in 1957 and asked, “Ray, I hear you’re writing
plays?” “Yes I am”, I answered. Then he asked
“Are they any good?” I told him I didn’t know.
Why not, he wanted to know. I told him, “You can’t read a
play – you have to see it.”
So he
told me to go to his house next Thursday night and he would have
actors there. They would stand up and read the plays out
loud. “Then we’ll know If you have anything worth
thinking about,” he said.
The next
Thursday I went to Cy Gomberg’s house and there were three actors
there. A wonderful young actor named Arthur Franz –
Strother Martin, the great character actor was there and James
Whitmore. You can’t do better than that!
They
started reading the plays and walked around and spoke my plays out
loud to me – and we all fell on the floor. The god-dammed things
worked!! They were good! I didn’t know I was in the
theatre from the age of twelve. I always had dreams of
writing plays and I was in Laraine Day’s little theatre
group at the Mormon Church when I was 19. I wrote a musical
with her which was fun, but the other plays were so bad that if you
put them out in the middle of the yard dogs would roll on them!
(laughing).
RP – I can’t imagine you
writing a bad play.
Ray
Bradbury – Oh yes. My dream was always to write plays
and by now I was 37 and on this evening these three actors proved
to me that I could be a playwright. Norman Corwin, my good
friend – the great radio producer, writer and director told me
about an amateur group over at Desilu, and he said there were some
directors there and actors and producers all trying to get ahead
with theatre. He said, why don’t you join the group?
So I went over and joined the group and got to know everyone and I
gave them my plays and in the next two weeks they acted them out.
They had no costumes – no props – no professionals; they were
all amateurs and they put on “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” and
later “The Pedestrians” – then they put on “Medicine for
Melancholy” and I saw the plays on two weekends in an almost
non-existent stage.
I
brought my friends home after the performances that night and they
all said – “poor Ray – too bad!”
But I
said, “Don’t worry. I can see beyond this.” We
had no rehearsals – no directors – no professional actors, but
even then I could see my plays – I could visualize them. I
told them, “I’m not disappointed – I know I’m a playwright,
so I’m going to save my money for a year” (because at that time
my income was very small – I only made about two hundred dollars
a week). So I did. I saved money for about two years
and rented the Coronet Theatre and put my first set of plays there
– “The World of Ray Bradbury”.
I had a
good cast of people that were on their way somewhere. But
what I wanted was not to make money, but to make
love. (laughing)
I wanted
the critics to say, “You think you’re a playwright? We
agree with you!” That’s what I hoped to have from that.
RP – What year was that when
you played the Coronet?
Ray
Bradbury – That was in late 1965 when we put up the plays and
when all the reviews came in, they were fantastic. But I
never made a dime!
RP – Did you make a large
investment? How much did it cost to put up the plays?
Ray
Bradbury – It cost me thirteen thousand dollars – all my
money. It cost about six hundred a week – and then we put
on another play – “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit”, and again
the reviews were excellent, and that’s what prompted me to form a
theatre – the Pandemonium Theatre, with Charles Rome Smith who
was an amateur director as I was an amateur writer, and we worked
together for forty years!
Over
that time we’ve done all these other plays, and we picked them
from among my short stories because I’m a hybrid writer!
RP – What is a hybrid
writer?
Ray
Bradbury – I’m half Lon Chaney – in the Hunchback of
Notre Dame or the Phantom of the Opera – I’m Charles Dickens on
stage doing Ebenezer Scrooge in a Christmas Carol, so I’m like
Dickens, a combination of things; I’m an actor and writer
– all that.
RP – Do you have many plays
you’re written?
Ray
Bradbury – I have a whole series of plays. About forty plays
altogether, but each time I go back to the short stories because
they are screen plays in plays. They are a
mixture of language and poetry. For example, when I published
The Martian Chronicles in 1950 we kidded people into thinking it
was a novel. It’s not really. It’s a collection of
short stories but when people read the book, they said, I don’t
care if it’s a novel or not. I like it!
Christopher
Isherwood reviewed it in Tomorrow Magazine and elevated the book
into an intellectual climate where I was accepted by people across
the country because before they didn’t want to have anything to
do with me. I was a science fiction writer. Isherwood
came to me and said, Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) wants to meet
you. He live down on Santa Monica – could you possibly have
tea with him someday? I agreed and went to have tea with
Aldous Huxley, one of my heroes, and as we spoke, he leaned forward
and said to me, “Mr. Bradbury, do you know what you are?”
I said,
no – what am I? He said – “You’re a poet – you’re
a POET!” To have Aldous Huxley say that to me! I
always wanted to write poetry – I took Poetry Club at Los Angeles
High School, but I was lousy at it. But I wrote every day for
forty years, and it went into my fiction. I’m a complexity
you see, and when I got into the stage, I just went back into the
well and took out my short stories. For example, “The
Pedestrian” which was a leading story in one of my collections
– that story led me into Fahrenheit 451.
RP – How did Fahrenheit
evolve from the Pedestrian?
Ray
Bradbury – I took that story and took that character out for
a walk one night, and as he walked he bumped into a young girl who
sniffed the air and said – “I smell kerosene on your uniform.
You must be Mr. Montag, the Fireman who lives up the block”.
And nine days later, the book was finished. As you see my
stories become novels – my novels become screen plays, and the
screen plays become plays, and all these things happen so that I
never know which way I’m going to turn next.
RP – Some of these will be
at the Fremont Theatre?
Ray
Bradbury – In about a week we’ll open at the Fremont with
stories that I wrote a few years back. Some of them ten years ago,
some of them twenty years ago, some even as far back as forty years
ago, published in various places. One thing I can say, I’ve
had a hell of a lot of fun with all of them!
RP – Is there one you like
more – or one that may be a favorite?
Ray
Bradbury – I’ve got one – called Device out of Time –
is taken from my novel "Dandelion Wine". Again, people think
that "Dandelion Wine" is a novel, but like the "Martian
Chronicles",
it’s a collection of short stories. In the middle of the novel,
my character Doug Spaulding goes to visit this man who has a
houseful of clocks. He’s like a time machine – if you
talk to him and press his button in one way he becomes the Buffalo Bill
who saw all those buffaloes, then he becomes General Grant, he becomes
Ching Ling Soo, the magician on the stage. I should tell you,
I knew Ching Ling Soo when I was seven years old. I fell in
love with magic when I was young, and I even went on the stage with
Blackstone the Magician and helped him make a horse disappear!
RP – How did he do it?
Ray
Bradbury – It’s magic! You see all these scenes are
in my mind and they get shuffled around they become scenes in
stories or plays, and so in this play about the man who is a time
machine, what the young Doug Spaulding realizes is that all old
people are time machines. You push the right button and they
start talking about the past and go back in time. So that
play is going to be fun – I’m giving it to an actor I’ve know
for about twenty years, a wonderful actor, and I know it’s going
to be a great evening of theatre because of Bill Clayton. The
first plays is a tribute to Charles Dickens – we’ve sort of
talked about him already. I wrote this story about
thirty-five years ago and published it in McCall’s magazine, of
all places. It was called “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby
is A Friend of Mine”.
I tell
this story as myself – the young Doug Spaulding who lives with
his grandparents and one day a boarder comes in and signs his name
as Charles Dickens. I accept him, because I’m in love with
literature, and I tell my grandfather about it and he replies,
"Any
friend of Nicholas Nickleby is a friend of mine". It turns out
that he’s not Charles Dickens but a man who wanted to be a writer
– he had taken all of his stories, his poetry and
got on a train and threw them off onto the tracks – and they
sprung up - a crop of corn among the landscape! Even if he
was a failed writer, when he got off the train he looked into the
mirror of a gum machine and saw a man with a beard and saw Charles
Dickens!
So he
became Charles Dickens and wandered around the country lecturing
and talking about writing and finally got to our boarding house,
and one day he says to me Pip – take a novel – you have a
pencil and paper?
Yes sir,
I said
He
starts telling me the story about, and it’s about two cities –
and I tell him – is it a tale of . . .
Yes –
go on - that’s it! He says "put it down." So I finish
– is it about a tale of two cities? So he begins to dictate
and eventually completes the "Tale of Two Cities".
The
third play is about an old inventor who invents a genuine imitation
mummy. The man was named Colonel Stonesteel, and Doug Spaulding
goes to visit him. The boy is having a boring summer and they
create a mummy out of old comic books and newspapers and put it on
display in the town and save themselves from the town’s
prejudice. By the end of the play Colonel gives me the mummy
to keep for a day or later, so when things get boring I’ll have
some distraction, but I say to him no thanks – because the boy is
really me and I’ll never be bored as long as have the ability to
write. In a way the plays are based on me and my childhood
and meeting people like Colonel Stonesteel. So there you have
the whole evening that’s coming up at the Fremont Theatre.
RP – The Fremont Centre
Theatre is one of my favorite small houses.
Ray
Bradbury – I love it there, and you know why? They have
a restaurant attached to it – you can have a good wine before the
play, and after the show, if you’re real good they’ll light a
candle for you in the patio and let you sit there and mull over
what you just saw! (laughing)
RP – Sounds like a great
evening!
Ray
Bradbury – That’s for this time around, but there’ll be
more plays at the end of summer– Halloween plays, followed by a
Christmas show – and then who knows what will come after that!
You see, I’ve published over five hundred short stories . . .
RP – Five hundred?
That’s an amazing number.
Ray
Bradbury - I’ve been writing a story a week, for
seventy years - that’s why I’m a happy writer. I don’t
understand people who become depressed or melancholy. I’ve
never had one day of melancholy in my life, except the days when my
friends die or my relatives, but that’s different.
There’s no way to escape that. But I don’t
understand depression – I’ve never had it because I have the
joy of writing every day. I teach that when I lecture. I’ll
be going up to Santa Barbara as part of the Writer’s Conference
and what I teach is love. I say to them, just write every day
of your life and write about what you love. Don’t write
anything for anybody else – it’s always you and if you do that,
then everyday will be happy. It doesn’t matter if it sells
or not. If you’re lucky it will sell, but the important
thing is what you think about your writing.
RP – When will Fahrenheit
451 be at the Rubicon in Ventura?
Ray
Bradbury – That’s coming in September – but it’s been
going around the country now. I’m very lucky that the
National Art people in Washington are putting it up all over the
country, so people are writing to me from all over asking if they
can put the play on in different places. Can we put it on in
Miami, they ask; can we put it on in New York – I even got a
request from Milan, in Italy.
RP – You wrote the screen
play for Moby Dick but you didn’t write the screen play for
Fahrenheit 451 the film.
Ray
Bradbury – That’s right – because the novel is a
screenplay in itself. Sam Peckingpah came to me thirty five
years ago and wanted to do something with “Something Wicked This Way
Comes”. I asked him how you’re going to it Sam, and he
said, “ Just tear the pages out of the book and put them in front
of the camera, because everything you write is a screen play!”
See up
there? (he waves his hand toward the wall with the video
cassettes) That’s all the movies ever made – the good ones -
the bad ones. I see them all, and I’ve learned how NOT to
write a movie.
RP – Fahrenheit is a very
frightening story – are you saying that we may be headed in that
direction?
Ray
Bradbury – We’re already there!
RP – Oh my gosh, really?
Ray
Bradbury – Well, not completely, but Hitler was burning
books, although he was smart enough not to do it in the open.
Stalin did that, but also behind the scenes. Other
civilizations have done it – some in South America but here in
this country we haven’t done it yet – thank God. But I
wrote about it because since I never went to college I went to the
library all the time and I educated myself at the library so my
love of libraries was hurt when I heard about the libraries in
Alexandria in Egypt 5000 years ago burning. They were burning
people – they were burning ideas they were burning philosophies
– so Fahrenheit is the result of my love of the books that go
back 5000 years.
Also, it
was with my beginning to see what was happening in with television,
which is mostly stupid – not destructive, but it’s moronic.
There’s nothing wrong with a big screen. It’s the ideas,
so I keep my TV turned to the station with big ideas and a small
screen can be made bigger if the ideas are bigger.
I was
raised on radio, and I saw that radio was like TV and when I was
twelve I used to play roles on the radio, because the Chicago
Tribune would publish scripts with blanks. This was in 1932.
The actors on radio would say something, and you’d answer back,
so the scene in my novel and my TV play about Mildred talking to
the TV set was based on my experience on radio when I was 12.
RP – How do you see
today’s world compared to when you were growing up.
Ray
Bradbury – My problem in America right now is our school
system. We’re not teaching reading and writing early
enough. We should intensely pursue the course of starting
three and four year olds to read and write so by the time they get
to first grade they have it all! Right now we’re testing
students in the third and fourth grade, which is completely wrong.
We need to go back to the three-year-old who is eager to learn, so
if we can cure that, America’s problem will begin to be solved.
RP – What do you thing can
be done about it?
Ray
Bradbury – I’m going to see to it that when I lecture at
libraries around the country I bring it up. Last year I lectured to
two hundred libraries on private TV and Laura Bush introduced me.
It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Libraries and librarians around
the country know that I love them and in the next six months I will
be speaking at ten libraries in California. I just spoke at six
libraries in the last few months and hundreds of libraries in the
last thirty years. So as I go I spread my word about the
educational system, and the teachers know what I’m talking about
and they’re going to change it. The more I keep talking
about it, eventually it may help to cure the problem.
RP- I certainly hope so.
A voice like yours can make a difference.
Ray
Bradbury – Well, we try. I’m also working on helping
to re-create Hollywood Boulevard because it’s a depressed area.
I’m making contacts with various people and I’m an
architectural advisor to the project. At the corner of
Hollywood and Highland I’ve created a mall based on D. W.
Griffith’s “Intolerance”. I talked to the Chamber of
Commerce twenty years ago and they finally built the mall and
opened five years ago, and the damn thing is very successful.
Have you seen it?
RP – Yes, I’ve been there.
Ray
Bradbury – Well, that’s mine. Now I’m talking to
them about doing something at Hollywood and Vine – because
“there is no there there.” People come from all
over the world to the most important corner that gave us a great
industry – we need to change it.
RP – Let me just mention one
of my favorite passages in the Martian Chronicles where a man takes
his family to the lagoon and telling them that they will be meeting
the Martians there. When
the young boy says, “Where are the Martians” the father has him
look at their reflection pointing out they are the new Martians.
It was wonderful.
Ray
Bradbury – That was the end of the play.
At that point we are joined by
Ditzy, one of Ray’s legendary cats.
Jet black, with saucer yellow eyes, he decides that the TV
tray is a good place to hop onto, especially if he can sit on the
recorder, which I have to sort of edge out from under him.
He stares intently at me, and reaches his paw out to touch
me. Meantime Ray is
undaunted and keeps on talking as if Ditzy had never appeared.
Ray
Bradbury – When I was twelve years old a carnival came to
Waukegan, Illinois and I saw Mr. Electrical being electrocuted.
He saw me standing at the edge of the ring, and touched me with his
electric sword and sent electricity toward me and said – “Live
Forever!”. I was amazed and the next day I had to go to a
funeral, but on the way back I asked my father to let me off near
the carnival. I found Mr. Electrical and asked him to show me
a magic trick. Then he took me to a tent to meet some other
carnival people and that was the idea for the Illustrated man.
We took a walk near the beach where he told me – “It’s good
to have you back in my life.” I had no idea what he meant,
and then he explained. “You were my best friend outside of
Paris back in 1918 – you were wounded in the back of our den and
you died in my arms back in 1918. Welcome back, even though
it’s a different name and a different face. But the soul shining
out of your eyes is the same! You’re the soul of my dead
friend.
RP – That is amazing.
Ray
Bradbury – The night before he had said “Live Forever!”
and the next day he told me I had lived before. So I walked
back through the carnival and stood near the carousel watching the
horses going into the future – around and around. Tears rolled
down my eyes – I had discovered that I could live forever, and
that I had already lived before!
The next
day was the day my family moved and went to Tucson, Arizona.
Shortly after we got there my father bought me a toy dial
typewriter and I began to write my recollections of the carnival.
I have been writing every single day for the last seventy five
years since my encounter with Mr. Electrical because of him.
RP – What a wonderful story.
Can we talk a little about the future?
I know that you are very interested in the Space Program.
Mr. Michael Griffith, director of NASA has said that he
believes that someday in the future the majority of humans will no
longer live on earth, but in some outpost – maybe a space station
or the moon – maybe even Mars.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Ray
Bradbury – Well, we should go back to the moon. We
should never have left there. We should have made a base.
The space station is not a good place to launch because it should
be solid and the moon is solid – not much gravity, but solid.
That’s where we should colonize and build a base so we can go to
Mars from there. Then 300 years from now, or so, we go to
Alpha Centauri.
RP – There are some critics
of the space station who feel it’s a waste of money.
Ray
Bradbury – It is, because it can’t be a way of getting to
Mars. The moon is the way to get to Mars, because, as we
said, it’s solid. The moon base has to be established.
RP – Have you seen a space
launch in person?
Ray
Bradbury – No because during the early launches all my
children were growing up and I wanted to show them part of the
world. I felt it was important to be with the family, but the
day we landed on the moon I did a TV show on TelStar with Walter
Cronkite. I was interviewed and gave my reasons for space
travel – it was a fabulous broadcast. I gave all my reasons
– mainly because mankind wants to live forever. When we
populate all the other planets we’ll finally have reached our
dream – that’s what space flight is all about!
But it
will take two or three thousand years, but we will do it
eventually. Along the way I’ll be buried on Mars. I
have given directions that my ashes will be taken along. twenty
years or thirty years from now, in a can of Campbell’s Soup and
planted in a crater called Bradbury’s Abyss.
RP – There is a crater called
Bradbury’s Abyss on Mars?
Ray
Bradbury – I’ve told them to call it that.
RP – That’s wonderful.
Well I certainly hope it happens like that.
Ray
Bradbury – I wish I could live to see it!
RP – Wouldn’t it be great
if what Mr. Electric told you happened?
That you lived before and would live forever?
Ray
Bradbury- I wish he were still alive. I’d go embrace him and
thank him for my life.
RP – If a young person with
ambitions to be a writer reads this interview, what would you
advice?
Ray
Bradbury – As long as you love what you write and write what
you love, you’ll be happy. Whether it sells or not doesn’t
matter. Don’t plan on it. Just do it. I turned
into a playwright when I was 35. I turned into a poet when I
was 42. Write and write and write, every single day of your
life, and you'll always be happy.
You
never know what’s going to happen!
By now Ditzy was stirring on
the TV tray, still sitting on the tape recorder, so the second tape
was definitely a huge plus. Not
wanting to overstay my welcome, I thanked Ray for his time, gently
moved Ditzy to the side, but as I was leaving he called over to his
assistant and asked him to bring something from another room.
It was the latest Ray Bradbury collection of stories,
containing 100 of Bradbury’s most celebrated tales. Any fan of
Bradbury will love the 890 pages of pure genius and imagination
that have been lovingly collected over the past sixty years.
When he opened it to sign his name and dedicate it I felt an
excitement and near giddiness similar to what he had described upon
meeting Mr. Electric.
Look for
“Ray Bradbury’s Green Town.” A new show written by Ray
Bradbury, based on his stories Directed by Alan Neal Hubbs.
Produced by Ray Bradbury and Racquel Lehrman. Presented by Ray
Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company. A guest production at
Fremont Centre Theatre.
WHERE:
Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Avenue, South Pasadena, CA
91030.
WHEN:
Previews June 21. Opens Friday, June 22, 2007 at 8 p.m. Closes
Sunday, July 29, 2007. Regular showtimes: Fri. & Sat. at 8,
Sun. at 3.
RESERVATIONS
AND INFORMATION: (323) 960-4451.
ONLINE
TICKETING: www.Plays411.Com/raybradbury
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