Summer Sets: Ray Bradbury

 I just found out that author Ray Bradbury died yesterday. 91 years old! It makes me very sad. Like many people, I was brought more deeply into the world of reading by the work of Ray Bradbury. He was accessible, and yet artistic and deep in his way. He was creative and distinctive, and his writing made you feel a little more alive. Powerful stuff.

Ray seemed so young. Always. That was his beauty, I think. And it was the beauty he put into his writing, most of the time. Even the scary stuff.

It’s interesting how much attention his so called “sci-fi” writing brought him, when I don’t think he would have considered himself a sci-fi writer at all. He used science fantasy imagery to tell moral and psychological tales, but that’s pretty much the extent of the “science” in his fiction. He wrote for the sci-fi pulps and was attracted to the imagery, but he was always very different than the other writers of that genre. Not that there’s anything wrong with science fiction.. I think it’s great stuff. I guess my point is only that it isn’t very accurate to call Ray Bradbury a “sci-fi” writer. He was not in any way limited to a single genre.

I’ve read a lot of Bradbury’s work. I have a whole shelf of novels and short story collections downstairs. Maybe a little more than a shelf. I don’t know. I’ve given some of it away. He started producing more novels in the latter part of his life, and they were pretty good. But they weren’t as read as his early works, even though they are just as good and maybe even better in some ways. There are even a few children’s books based on some of his stories. One of them glows in the dark. You can actually read it in the dark. Cool stuff.

Call me “trite,” but my favorite Ray Bradbury novel was Dandelion Wine, which I believe is a masterpiece. It’s not the Great American Novel, I think that title goes to The Grapes of Wrath, but it’s one of the great American novels, methinks. It’s a celebration of summer, a gathering of vignettes in the life of a young boy that are all held together by nostalgia and the notion that the (somewhat) innocent wonder of childhood can keep our eyes open to the profound nature of everyday life.

My favorite Bradbury short story is actually one that had none of the “rocket” or “sci-fi” trappings in it. It’s about the tragedy of racism. In fact, he wrote several stories, in the 1940s and 1950s, that dealt with racism in very interesting ways. But this one I like is called “The Great Black and White game.” He wrote it very early in his career, and it was later put in his short story anthology called “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” which is where I came across it. I read this in my late teens/early twenties, and it had a big impact on my idea of what makes a great story – all of the things it said without saying it. Powerful stuff.

I found an online publication of the story in an old magazine that has been scanned. It’s here if you want to read it:

THE GREAT BLACK AND WHITE GAME

It has the character “Douglas,” who is the main character in Dandelion Wine. In case you didn’t know, Ray’s middle name was Douglas. This seems to have been his way of putting himself, at least in part, into his writings. No one knows for sure how autobiographical a lot of things are, but when you're writing about feelings instead of facts, then it doesn't matter a lot anyway.

I wonder how many things he’s written that they will publish now that he’s gone. “Posthumous works,” they call them. Sounds creepy. And it’s a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s not. There are reasons that some things aren’t published. They simply weren’t good enough. They belong in a file somewhere. Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes is a prime example of one that should have been kept quiet. But money talks.

Anyhow. Ray is gone and it makes me sad.

Summer will never be the same.


Peace to you.
© LW Publishing 2011

John Carter and the Politics of Yesterday’s News

Yeah. It’s April. March is long gone.

Something I noticed: One of the big stories in the month of March was how the John Carter movie was somehow predetermined to be the biggest box office flop in history. Even Disney, the company that released it, made a prediction that it was going to dig a financial hole of about 200 million dollars. Why did they say that during the first week of release? Why predict your own disaster? What can be gained from that? It’s like they were trying to wreck their own film!

Of course, that was all in March. Which might as well be a thousand years ago. You will notice that no one is really talking about John Carter anymore. It’s yesterday’s news. But here’s what they aren’t saying in April: John Carter is nowhere near the biggest box office flop of all time. In fact, it did amazingly well overseas and has more than earned back it’s production budget. And by the time the DVD and Blu-ray releases are rolled out, it will probably not be a loss at all. It won’t make piles of money for the company, but it’s not going to sink the company either. And yet, people were saying, way back in March, as if it were a done deal, that this movie was absolutely sure to be the biggest flop in history.

There was clearly something malicious going on in the media. I don’t know why. I don’t know what encouraged the behavior, but it was weird. Was it an anti Disney thing? It was almost like what happens during elections, where people are told what to think, and then they simply submit to it. No one likes negative advertising, right? So why is there so much negative advertising during elections? Because it works. And, strangely, it worked to crush John Carter in a very similar way. Some media whoevers seem to have purposefully misled people about the film with what amounts to a lie. And no one is talking about it. Like no one talks about all the lies the politicians say during a campaign. They can say anything, but once the campaign is over, no one goes back to assess what they said and hold them accountable. Nobody cares.

Making John Carter was always going to be a bit of a risk because the source material has pretty much gone out of the popular culture. But Star Wars and all of the movies that have resulted from the Star Wars phenomenon over the years – every one of those films owes a lot to the John Carter novels. John Carter was there first. In the end, it was a risk that didn’t pay out like they wanted. But what’s life, or art, without some risk?

I asked a few people if they had seen the movie. They said, “No.” And then they would add something to the “no” along the lines of: “I heard that movie was horrible. It’s lost so much money!” I found this response strange. Since when does the average person decide how good a movie is by rumors of the first week’s box office? What is going on? All kinds of great movies didn’t make a lot at the box office! In every case where someone told me they heard it was “horrible” they had not heard it from someone who had actually seen the movie. It was just rumor, based on the contagious news reports, based on articles, which were driven by assumptions. And, oddly enough, reinforced by Disney itself. Very, very strange.

I am one of those people who ignored the negative hype and went to see the movie. What I discovered is what I expected to see. John Carter is a fun, entertaining movie that captures the sense of the original novels (which most of the critics seemed to be completely ignorant of), without succumbing to the archaic things that make those novels hard to read today. Some people aren’t going to like it, especially if they aren’t partial to sci fi or fantasy, but most people will. It is an adventure story, which is what it is supposed to be. The effects are good and some are even groundbreaking. The acting is loose and fun. The characters could have been a bit more sympathetic, but you still care about them. The humor is broad, on purpose. Except for one scene near the beginning with some crude dialogue, it is a relatively clean film with general appeal. The opening sequence seems kind of tacked on, probably because they felt like it took too long to get to Mars. I see why they did it, but I would have preferred the movie to start after the opening. Whatever. It’s not a big thing. It does a good job of combining a simple love story with an action scenario. It’s old school enough to be fun, but new school enough to be interesting.

And there is a battle scene at the center of the film that simultaneously reveals John Carter’s motivations that is crafted by the director into a truly moving sequence. That short section of the film was worth the price of admission for me. Most of the men I’ve talked to who have seen it agree that it stirs an odd set of emotions. The juxtaposition of violence and rage, blended with tragedy and sadness, all to make a point about what moves men, in particular, to risk their lives and care for others – it shows why the director, Andrew Stanton, is such a great artist.

I know. I know. It’s mostly gone from theaters. Who cares. If you want to just see a movie for fun and you don’t hate sci fi or fantasy films, then you are likely to enjoy it. Go see it in a theater if you can because it is a big screen movie for sure. If you think it stinks, fine, but make that decision by seeing the film, not by listening to negative hype, and certainly not by reviewing box office returns and rumors.




Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

Robot Monster

A while back I did a 3D movie night with my kids. We did this at home, not at the theater, and it wasn’t with the new high-falutin’ new-fangled overpriced stuff you see coming out at the stores. We watched Robot Monster in 3D with the old fashioned card-board glasses.

The kids liked the movie, which shows me I’m doing something right as a parent. And it took me back to when I was a kid, watching this movie on a Saturday afternoon with Sir Graves Ghastly, who was a local TV movie host that dressed up as a vampire.

The great thing about Robot Monster is that it is truly one of the worst movies ever made, and yet, somehow, it is wonderful to behold. The sheer audacity of putting a man in a gorilla suit with an old fashioned diving helmet for a head, paired with a cave and a bubble producing communication machine . . . I am stunned by the bravery of the man who made this film. And it holds the distinct honor of almost always being listed among some of the worst movies ever made.

But let me tell you a not-so-secret secret: The films that end up on the worst movies ever made lists are not really the worst movies ever made. What they are is low budget films that really should be bad, and certainly are bad on a technical level, but somehow people love to watch them. Just like people like cheesy songs. Just like people love to eat weird disgusting food.

Robot Monster is one of the best of the worst. Way.

And yet, it was apparently a bad experience for the director, Phil Tucker. Not the making of the film, but the reviews. From every story I’ve read, he had a blast making the movie. He thought he had a classic on his hands. But when it first came out, according to some different sources, Phil Tucker attempted suicide in response to the profoundly negative reviews.

People laugh about this now, but I’m sure it wasn’t funny to Phil. Not at the time. And I can relate. I have received some pretty negative reviews in my life too. I have produced things that people have torn apart with their words and attitudes. It’s amazing how hard people will beat you down. They seem to enjoy it. And for what? For not meeting their expectations.

But Phil made it through, somehow. He kept at it. He went on to direct five or six more movies, including a movie starring comedian Lenny Bruce. None of them were quite as bad as Robot Monster, but you can’t come up with a winner every time.

The good news is that Phil found his wings. He became a very successful editor working on big budget films in Hollywood for the rest of his career. He also earned a U.S. Patent for a turbine engine that he created.


He was a very smart man.




Galatians 6:9
Peace to you.




© LW Publishing 2010