I was today years old when I learned that the iconic American Sci-Fi writer Ray Bradbury was also a Hollywood screenwriter. The Los Angeles Review of Books recently published a fascinating story on the fraught collaboration between Bradbury and the great director John Huston.
Some in Hollywood were taken aback by Huston's screenwriting choice to bring Melville to the big screen. After all, to adapt a profoundly complex literary novel, he had given the nod to a man known for writing science fiction. Perhaps no one was more surprised by Huston's choice than Bradbury himself. Huston had read the most recent book Bradbury had sent him, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and the lead story was all it took.
"The Fog Horn" is a tale about two lighthouse keepers who, late one November night, are paid a visit by a beast that has surfaced from the depths after hearing the lonely call of the lighthouse's foghorn. Bradbury's love of dinosaurs had led him to write the story, and it was this love that led Huston to believe he was the right man to adapt Moby-Dick. In reading "The Fog Horn," Huston stated in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, he "saw something of Melville's elusive quality."
Sam Weller's piece on how Ray Bradbury came to write the screenplay for John Huston's adaptation of Moby-Dick is an intriguing read.
Sam Weller is a two-time Bram Stoker Award–winning and best-selling biographer of Ray Bradbury. He worked with Bradbury for 12 years on The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (HarperPerennial, 2006) and Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews (Hat & Beard Press, 2017).
No comments:
Post a Comment