Ode to Ray Bradbury died a few hours ago at 91

[gavintonks]

Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury dies - CNN.com

the great Ray Bradbury has died and the boards are full of interesting stuff about him
DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS was a pretty decent mystery and very vivid. I read one of his others but don't recall it as well.

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Todd Mason <[email protected]> wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/ray-bradbury-popularizer-of-science-fict\
ion-dies-at-91.html?_r=1&_r

Ray Bradbury, who is best remembered for his fantasy and science fiction, though
he made his first big splash as a writer of horror fiction, also wrote along the
edges of the hardboiled, publishing crime fiction novels later in his career,
and his suspense fiction (ranging from "The Small Assassin" through "The October
Game" and up through "Gotcha!" and many others) was often noirish or of similar
spirit, as was such sf as "To the Future" or his justly famous "The Sound of
Thunder"...even if he didn't work this mode as regularly as such friends of his
as Robert Bloch.

Not for nothing were such writers as Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and
William F. Nolan, among others, tagged the "Little Bradburys"...I suspect they
tended to take this, meant rather condescendingly at first usage, as a badge of
honor.

Todd Mason

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[Steerpike]

RIP. I love his work.

 

[gavintonks]

. I was a small part of a Bradbury fan club...Ray led a very high profile for his age, with lots of speaking engagements, some big, many small. He was a huge supporter of libraries and bookstores and one of our areas of discussion was the local LA bookstore scene (he and I were big fans of a Long Beach used bookstore, a bit like NY's The Strand, which is sadly long gone). Ray very intelligently saw the problems of writing for movies and TV, instead he turned to writing plays, then with his friends he put them on, about twice a year for many years. It was usually done as a very small operation: high school auditoriums and such, with a minimal budget, and that was just great for all of us. Fun to see it done, fun to sit with all lot of other fans and with him just a few seats away, it was an amateur production in the best sense of the word...

 

[gavintonks]

Los Angeles Times obit
Ray Bradbury, enduring author of fantasy, science fiction, dies at 91 - latimes.com

Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 1:24 PM
To: Lokke Heiss; IAFA
Subject: Re: [IAFA-L] Bradbury RIP


Loki,

Do you think the scripts of his independent play productions were all published?

Apparently he also had “Ray Bradbury Theater,” that ran from 1986-1992--I'd be curious to know if some of those television scripts made it into the high school auditoriums, of if those independent productions tended to be more avant garde.

It doesn't matter now, but how could any agent say that to Ray Bradbury--unless of course like you say, it was dramatized. Or if the agent actually didn't recognize his name? I'm not sure which is worse.

I remember Bradbury saying he was a student of the Kraft meal, when people asked him how he could afford to be a full-time writer.


> Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2012 13:05:23 -0500

> Subject: [IAFA-L] Bradbury RIP
>
> Looks like I'm the first to post about Ray Bradbury's death.
>
> There's an excellent obit in today's NY Times.
>
> My last phone conversation with Bradbury was in 2005. I had called him to tell him I was moving out of LA, but the conversation quickly changed: He had just left an agent's office and was upset because the agent told him 'he couldn't write.' (Now we all know Bradbury wasn't beyond dramatizing a situation, I would love to know what was really said in that meeting). Anyway we had a nice conversation about the difficulties of a balancing writing with your life and I hung up, thinking that might be the last time I talked to him personally. He was someone who never lost his interest in the rest of us, big and small.
>
> I was a small part of a Bradbury fan club...Ray led a very high profile for his age, with lots of speaking engagements, some big, many small. He was a huge supporter of libraries and bookstores and one of our areas of discussion was the local LA bookstore scene (he and I were big fans of a Long Beach used bookstore, a bit like NY's The Strand, which is sadly long gone). Ray very intelligently saw the problems of writing for movies and TV, instead he turned to writing plays, then with his friends he put them on, about twice a year for many years. It was usually done as a very small operation: high school auditoriums and such, with a minimal budget, and that was just great for all of us. Fun to see it done, fun to sit with all lot of other fans and with him just a few seats away, it was an amateur production in the best sense of the word.
>
> A final thought: Bradbury was very had to get right on the screen. The best adaptation I think was Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451, nothing else worth mentioning, even though numerous TV shows tried. BUT - his stories worked well on radio and in comics. Lots of Bradbury stories done on radio in the 50s, and EC comics has adaptations that work if you want to look for them. Of course there are always his books.

 

[gavintonks]

The book store I mentioned was Acres of Books. Bradbury was nice enough to blurb about it and they put his comments at the front of the store.

Acres Of Books Long Beach | Memories by the volume at bookstore - Los Angeles Times

Don't have a clue about his plays. I know he wrote lots and lots in the last decade of his life. I'm sure his agent would be thrilled to get them more formally published. If I had to guess, I'd guess that a large amount of his work from 80 to 90, is unpublished. That was the gift of the small theater-it didn't matter really to him if he was published or not.

I've mentioned the agent story on this list before, in fact I remember getting chastised for it, as if I was revealing a important details of a private conversation. In fact, anyone who knows Ray knows he talked like this to everyone all the time, strangers and close friends. He wouldn't have given a damn if I mentioned this to anyone or not, that was one of his gifts, not caring what people thought about what was said. Of course he did care about some things, but that was not one of them. Also anyone who knew Ray knew that he (like many of us) exaggerated his personal stories. I have complete confidence that the agent said something like: "Mr. Bradbury, your treatment isn't right for us." What Bradbury was doing, and something that I understood when he said it to me, was the agent was telling him his treatment wasn't right for the current film market. What I didn't ask him was if this was a treatment on one of his earlier stories or if this was something else. That would hav
e been interesting. But what I got from his comment was that the people at the studio were passing on his treatment, and were saying indirectly that his writing style was not compatible for the present studio films...which was probably a very accurate comment! So Bradbury was compressing all that into a pithy comment. I'm sure the agent never said he couldn't write, period, he was saying what he could do wasn't right for their concept of a film script. The only movie script I know that Bradbury really did was Moby Dick and that script is legendary for its problems, and that was many decades ago. What I didn't say to Bradbury was that not many other 85 year olds get a chance to pitch a movie script to a studio, and if Frank Capra and Orson Welles weren't getting green-lighted it was no surprise that he wasn't either. I didn't need to say that. Bradbury knew all that, he didn't need me to spell it out for him and that's why he moved to the theater and wrote plays. It was a ver
y smart response to the Hollywood system being unsympathetic to what he could do. Hollywood studios are there to make money, not to be nice, and he got a lot more satisfaction being king of a small fiefdom that being a paid servant to Lord Hollywood.
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[gavintonks]

Ray Bradbury - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[gavintonks]

Ray Bradbury

 

[Dark Huntress]

He was one of my favorites for many years and still is. RIP Mr. Bradbury. Many are following in the footsteps you left behind.

 

[Philip Overby]

And excellent writer and icon in the SF world, Ray Bradbury has passed today at 91.

I'd like to recommend to anyone who hasn't read his stories, that he's an great writer to study on craft. Especially of writing short stories. In addition Fahrenheit 451 may be an indicator of our future if the publishing industry somehow collapses and no one produces books anymore. As if you want a good writing book, "Zen and the Art of Writing" by Bradbury is often acclaimed as good source.

Anyway, today let's celebrate the life of a legend and pay our respects. Find a Bradbury story online if you can, and read it. Or just post your thoughts about Bradbury here.

(I posted this in another thread before I realized there was already one)

 

[Penpilot]

A piece of living history has moved on. His stories sparked my imagination when I was young. Martian Chronicles. Fahrenheit 451 and many more.